Biography
I am an artist living in the north of London and the North of England. I work predominantly in paint but also find self-expression in chalk pastels, colouring pencils, water colours, stone-clay, film and video.
My parents were both artists and from a young age I was encouraged to pursue a career in the arts and crafts industry. I’ve always been able to draw and capture the appearance of things around me well. This is probably to do with a strong sense of spatial awareness and cognitive ability. I have many academic achievements in the arts from a young age and this enabled me to join a Foundation course at the Leeds College of Art in the City of Leeds, North England. Overtime my interests have changed from figurative painting, sculpture and film making. Eventually, my academic achievements granted me a place on the Fine Art Undergraduate course at the Slade School of Fine Art (2019-2022). Overtime, my work progressed and now I have a large body of paintings, which describe my own understanding and ideas in contemporary art.
Professional Statement
My paintings offer a series of portraits of the artist as a young man. With a belief in the divided-self
and self-conception as multitudes. I am interested in finding different compositions and ways of
placing people in spaces that will explain different ideas about myself.
The overall design of the painted spaces, should invoke an emotional response from the viewer and
also an underlying sensation of insecurity. I hope for the viewer to take on the challenge of this
investigative role and follow close attention to the similarities and dissimilarities within the different
paintings.
The paintings can be characterised by the use of primary colours, which help to the audience
navigate these spaces. The pointillist technique and impasto technique are used seamlessly to
distinguish different areas and distances within the painting. An important element of the work, is the
exploration of mark making, patterning and harmonies of form. These themes change regularly
through the body of work; I believe with every new painting I make I learn something about what its
like to paint.
I use a number of different scale canvases, this gives me the opportunity to paint different
landscapes, objects and portraits. This also, helps me to play with scale in the picture and invent and
imagine new compositions, new peoples and deeper emotional expressions.
Farmers, Oil on Canvas, 50cmx50cm
This painting exemplifies my own parodying of traditional portraiture. The bare chested woman on the left-hand-side stands just behind her male counterpart on the right-hand-side who wears a brown leather jacket. The pointillist technique denotes a bubbling, pock-marked irritable skin condition. The faces are corroded and pixellated by small brush-marks of colour.
I want to observe the interplay of androgynous figuration.
What does it mean to bring together figures discharged of stereotypes? How do I humanise figures of disease and sickness? What does a harmonious relationship look like when their bodies describe pain and abuse? The fixed stare, the frontally and aggression is a visual feature of modernism but their form recalls a more neo-primitivist and anti-naturalist sentiment.
The painting also makes loose-reference to the American Gothic painting by Grant Wood. Acknowledging the underlying horror element, this painting also calls to mind H.P Lovecraft’s short stories.
Domestic Scenario, oil on canvas, 40cmx60cm
This painting started as a study for a larger painting that was never completed. I continue to use the same repetitive-mark making and pointillist technique that characterises my paintings.The spotty, mosaic-like, marks create a lattice of marks an invisible film on top of the foreground makes us question the reliability of our vision. I believe most paintings, contain within it an unspoken psychological barriers that the artist needs to have demonstratively transgressed for the work to properly function. I think the symbolism in the work evidences some kind of disturbance that speaks to the audience about their own lived-experiences and personal fears. The sexualised figure on the left-hand-side, sits recumbent on a green throne.The more reserved character on the right crosses his arms like a dead-man. Although his stare remains transfixed on the viewer and alert to the world around him. The fiery background behind him describes the suffering, injustice and pollution of the modern world. His vacant, self-assured expression shows us he is not consumed in flames but is preparing for transformation, a baptism of fire. And between them a lonely room of ancient technology, liminality and disorder operates.
The painting demonstrates the ability to invent systems of symbolism and form. In this painting there is an overbearing sense of duality and counterparts in correspondence with one another. A thing that describes systems of transformation and imagination. Imagination is the real and eternal world of which these vegetable universes are but a faint shadow.
Funeral, Oil on Canvas
This is another example of a painting which examines ideas of multiplicity and the modernist obsession with the divided-self. The people on the left-hand side are dead and rotting. I use the muddy impasto technique to portray rotting-flesh, disease and decomposing bodies. They float on layers on a river of small brush-marks and mosaic-like squares. The figure on the right hand side addresses the audience with his fixed gaze and distant expression. He holds a muddy bouquet of flowers in the lower right. The people floats towards the top of the painting implying ideas of ascension and spiritual projection. The colourful trickster-type character on the far left travels alongside a more cold and silent character in the middle. I think the challenging stare of the man on the right must be rhetorical. The space utilises ambiguity and obscurity to promoting an unanswerable message, and nonetheless I can detect his sincerity.
Southerner, Oil on Canvas, 200cmx170cm
I am representing the inside of his head. The two windows on the left hand-side of the table are dappled with a golden white. The three windows on the horizon reveal to us a landscape. It makes me think of the German idiom,’to not have all the cups in the cupboard’- a figurative way to describe someones a mental disturbance. A cold hand separates the plate of raw flesh and the ghostly vase (phallic symbolism) from an enamel pill-box with floral decorations. The painting mirrors the investigative stance of the audience makes us question our own standing. The circular table and the number of chairs suggests this is a place where people meet and come together. Underneath the table, the invisible doorways, the looming windows, these are portals which imply distant spaces- out of time or out of step with the foreground. The space is also separated into primary colours and textural transitions, helping the audience to look around the room and allowing their eyes to fall upon symbolic features.The room generates a sense of inertia, leery symbolism and gormless primitivism are the shelters of this existence. Once again, the overall message is left deliberately unclear and imperfect.
This painting also calls to mind the visuality of Film Noir and Thriller cinema. Specifically, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo or Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
This painting also makes loose references to the 1930 American Gothic painting by Grant Wood.
L’Apparition, oil on canvas, 70cmx50cm
This painting speaks to my own innovative and nuanced approaches to the medium.
In this painting im using a painterly technique referred to in some circles as ‘Popcorn Impasto’. By building up successive layers of paint, the colour gets muddied and accentuates its textural qualities. By realising this mixture of colour across the canvas, I establish a ‘normal’, which then gets divided into smaller gradations of itself. This curious inference of painted space also distorts the figure in unforeseen ways.
The drawn-outline is obliterated by this repetition of marks and gives way to a gloomy atmosphere of auras and halos.
The title ‘L’Apparition’ makes reference to a 19th century painting by French artist Gustav Moreau, that describes the biblical story of Salome and her vision of John the Baptist’s severe head.