Alan Halliday (b. 1952) is an internationally established British artist whose work is distinguished by fluent draughtsmanship, vivid colour and a bold, calligraphic handling of line. He was trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art and awarded a doctorate in History of Art by Oxford University in 1982. His early development was encouraged by the British neo-romantic painter John Piper, who described his work as “an arrangement of painted marks, all on the surface and yet all in depth”.

Over a professional career spanning more than forty years, Halliday has worked across landscape, interiors, still life, figurative painting, abstraction and performance. His paintings and works on paper are united by an immediacy of observation and a strong sense of movement, whether capturing the atmosphere of a room, the rhythm of a landscape or the physical energy of figures in motion.

A significant strand of Halliday’s practice has been shaped by theatre, music and live performance, with subjects associated with The Royal Ballet, Royal Opera, Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, English National Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Mariinsky Ballet and Shakespeare’s Globe. He was also on-set artist for the Oscar-winning film 'Shakespeare in Love' and has received BBC commissions connected to major productions and concerts.

His work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of London, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and several Oxford University colleges, including St John’s, Worcester, New College and St Catherine’s. Writing in The Times, art critic John Russell Taylor observed that while line defines the form in Halliday’s work, “it is the colour which gives it form and life.”

Halliday now lives in France near the Loire, continuing to work across a wide range of subjects that reflect his long-standing interest in place, memory, performance and the act of looking.