Originally from Cumbria, Deborah Ann Graham lives and works in Cheshire. She completed a BA in Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic in the 1980s and will compleat her MA at Manchester School of Art, in 2026.

Graham is an oil painter whose work explores how source material, memory and sensation can be shifted, disrupted and reimagined through paint. Her paintings begin with references that spark her interest, but these are held loosely, leaving space for exploration, memory and impulse to shape the work as it develops. She gathers drawings, painted studies and collected imagery through collage, using it as a way into the painting: a framework that suggests possibilities while helping to hold the work to abstraction.

Interested in what remains of an image as it moves through paint, Graham allows something of its weight, tone, depth and shape to continue to inhabit the work without remaining tied to its original identity. Working gesturally in oil, she pushes and pulls the paint around, balancing control and freedom as forms emerge, dissolve and reappear. Colour is used intuitively, with her palette often affected by seasonal changes and their accompanying shifts in mood and atmosphere.

At their simplest, the paintings are about paint and the act of painting itself. They are records of gesture, duration, looking, memory and decision-making, connected to the visible world while resisting certainty. Through image, colour, surface and transformation, her works invite viewers to move between recognition and ambiguity, finding their own associations within the painted surface.

She has exhibited widely in group and solo shows and was selected for the RA Summer Exhibition 2024, shortlisted for the RA Summer Exhibition, the VAA Open, and the Fronteer Gallery Judges choice award in 2025 and shortlisted for the Jacksons Art Prize in 2025 and 2026.

Her work is held by collectors locally and internationally.