aeartist

I like to capture images of people, but to create my own story with them. When we pass a stranger in the street, and look them in the face for just a second before walking on, we are engaging in the same sort of dialogue as I hope my paintings are able to capture. By slowing down our perceptions we are able to draw so much from a passing face, and our indifference to it grants us an objectivity that is difficult to recapture. For me, oil paints reflect the visceral mutability of human nature, and canvas has a tight suppleness that reminds me of skin.

Enlarged faces that stare out of the canvas that confront and challenge the viewer. Sometimes the faces are true to life, other times pieces of several ideas or people will come together in one piece. I work in broad brush strokes and quick slashes of the knife with thick oil paint, often mixed with an impasto medium.

If I am a portrait painter, that’s incidental, I feel more like a conceptual artist working through the medium of portraiture, not attempting to create either an image of the sitter, or capture in any way their soul, but to produce an image of myself and solidify the ethereal moment between conception and execution of the piece.

I work with both primary and secondary materials, from found images in newspapers, magazines, art history books and especially the internet, I splice together a composite piece that resembles none of the original source matter, yet still contains all the information from them that I want the viewer to receive. With every brush stroke and every slice of the palette knife I’m grafting together an image of myself, of humanity and of the viewer.

I use oil paints on canvas. I like the skin like quality of a taught canvas and the plasticity of oils. To quote a favourite artist of mine, Jenny Saville, it's like working with liquid flesh.

Lucien Freud, Stanley Spencer, Jenny Saville, Francis Bacon, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, von Dongen, Leonardo, Schiele, Raphael, Bellini, Klimt, Ingres, Michelangelo, the internet and mass media, friends and family, classical sculpture, medical books, etc.

Every new piece I produce is my favourite, until I make the next new piece. My favourite work by another artist is probably Jenny Saville's 'Host'. There's an intoxicating lewdness that the carcass exudes that is also grotesque, and especially repellent. Just seeing the painting makes my heart soar; the scale is grandiose and the paint is applied in such a sexual way... It's truly a painter's painting.