Your works resemble magnifying lenses on particular details. What leads your gaze to focus on the “part”? And from here, the choice of small canvas sizes: why these small but meticulously detailed “windows”?
By only showing a small slice of a scene, focus is directed to what is not pictured as the mind attempts to extrapolate a larger context from that sliver, to piece together a broader story. We seek to solve the problems we’re presented with, but there is no single or salient resolution. I’m interested in that automatic function of internal narrativisation and the personal and/or collective subconscious that feeds into that. That’s why I reference film, time-based media and story-boarding a lot in my work, as a nod to the collective imagery we are all swimming in and affected by either consciously or unconsciously, and also as an exploration of high-impact, fleeting phenomena and the mnemonic resonance left behind. In terms of scale, I like to keep things roughly to life scale. I feel like this aids in that exercise of recognition and familiarity, and also of teasing out a sense of desire and discovery in the experience of the works. There’s something so potent about modest sizes and they lend themselves well to work that is inherently orbiting themes of intimacy and mystery.
From a chromatic point of view, it’s possible to see a strong contrast between darkness, gloominess, and the interplay of lights and clear highlights. Both technically and conceptually, what does this duality represent? What do you like and find appealing in it?
The more I work the more I realise that colour is really at the core of it all in such a baseline way. Sounds moot given we’re talking about painting, but as a figurative artist who hones in on subject matter meticulously, it might be surprising to hear that I often start a whole story with colour. It’s frequently the first thing I see when I’m conceptualising a new body of work, in the same way a DOP would pull focus from a chromatic blur to crisp life. I like my work to live somewhere between those two states and that idea of ‘pulling from the depths’ is sort of where those ashy or muted browns and greens come in, as mental fragments and memories seem to coalesce from a muddy blur and dissipate from whence they came. Add to this the richness of deep or brilliant reds, plums, flashes of light and you pump that blur full of visceral elemental tonality and it’s almost a ritual act of re-animating that which has faded, like suspending something in amber. Interplay of disparate elements is technically and thematically everywhere in my work. I am fascinated by dualities, or multifariousness in general. The notion that many seemingly contradictory elements can be true and relevant simultaneously is where life seems to begin, and yet we’re pretty bad at accepting and celebrating this. Our quotidian systems have to simplify things down and so we get used to all the guard rails and structure, but seeing vast connections and contradictions doesn’t have to be an overwhelming, mind-stretching feeling. There’s a wonderful communion and recognition there, a great lullabye inside it all, too.
