Marina Renee-Cemmick

Artist Profile

Marina Renée-Cemmick (b. 1994, England). Lives and works near Glasgow.

Marina Renée-Cemmick is a figurative artist working in charcoal, coloured pencil and oil paint. Her subject is the human body: how people move, hold themselves and relate to one another through touch or its absence. She draws from life, memory and imagination, and her pictures range from direct observation to staged, dreamlike scenes.

Training in contemporary and tap dance, and later in Butoh and physical theatre, shapes her approach to the figure. She often starts from dance, theatre or her own movement, layering several images of a body in one composition to record motion over time. One series was drawn during rehearsals and performances of Flabbergast Theatre Company’s Macbeth. Works range from small oils on paper of around 15 x 11 cm to charcoal drawings more than a metre high. She also draws on art history and religious iconography, in particular Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves and Pietà sculptures. Alongside this she paints portraits and public murals.

Renée-Cemmick graduated in Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2018, including an exchange at Kyoto Seika University, Japan. That year she received the Royal Scottish Academy’s John Kinross Scholarship to Florence, and in 2020 she completed the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School, London. Solo exhibitions include Underlying Structures at The New Glasgow Society (2019) and Interactions: Body & Theatre with Brushes With Greatness, London (2022). She has shown with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the New English Art Club at the Mall Galleries, at Christie’s, and in the Portrait Award 2024 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She received a New English Art Club scholarship in 2022 and appeared on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year in 2023.

Her work is held in the Royal Collection and the collection of the Royal Scottish Academy.