Artist's Statement
My paintings are intimate, intense and meticulously detailed employing a realism that examines subtle rips and tears in fragmented and collaged imagery. The subconscious process I employ commences with a fast-paced selection and amalgamation of imagery. This allows an unconventional logic of abstracted views and compositions creating a world in which reality takes on a heightened intensity. Followed by a precise and gradual style of painting, the paintings transcend their apparent pattern of contradictions, promoted by the use of collage as their primary source.
The paintings are a form of contemporary surrealism and each painting is subject to its individual meaning due to the different imagery used to create obscure and surreal outcomes. By juxtaposing different imagery, sourced from both the National Geographic and Financial Times magazines. By sourcing imagery from these particular magazines, a stark contrast between the imagery used within the paintings is present, rendering subjects belonging to exploration, advertising, finance and the global market. By amalgamating the imagery obtained from specific magazines a new language and environment is formed, often touching upon political subjects. By cutting out the imagery from each magazine by hand, a white line is seen within the painting, specifically around the figures to convey the relationship formed between the hand cut imagery and the digitalised society in which we live in.
In addition, to surrealism the paintings touch upon fantasy and futuristic landscapes depicted via the inclusion of space within which the figures are painted, sitting in between an interior and exterior world, highlighted by the figures locates within overpowering landscapes, often eerie, dense and rich in context painted intensely to invite the audience to contemplate and view the forms and compositions taking place in detail.
The technique of layering oil on to board, generates a bold colour palette and adds to the paintings’ intended intensity and jewel- like, seductive quality enhanced by glazing and the use of additional mediums such as linseed oil and glaze medium. The intensity of colour and detail enhances promotes the sense of surreal representation of conscious and unconscious events. In addition to the contradictory relationship between illusion and surface, created by trompe I’oeil, one of the works’ primary objectives is to suggest a sense of bodies confined within unconventional spaces.