Biografia
In the late 1990s, I first started painting small scale pictures from photos, mostly using a macro lens, that I took whilst driving through the city. This strategy helped curtail my ability to consciously compose, in order to produce images that were less ‘planned’, and that had an element of surprise. More recent work is a natural progression from these earlier paintings, although the work is more ambitious in scale and encompasses a more diverse range of subjects.
The major theme throughout my work has always been the perennial problem of representation: where to draw the line between ‘real life’ and ‘art’, illusion and abstraction, transcription and composition. Although we tend to view this question as a peculiarly modern one, the problematic relationship between illusion and reality originates from ancient debates and was one that dominated the art of the seventeenth century as much as it pre-occupies the art of our own time. I am interested in a wide range of painters whose works have incorporated aspects of the pictorial mode evident in lens-based images, be it Vermeer's 'circles of confusion' or his lesser known contemporary, Willem Kalf in the seventeenth century or seminal artists from the sixties to the present, such as Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Johannes Kahrs and Judith Eisler, to name only a few. Though these artists represent a diverse stylistic range, it could be suggested that they universally adopt what might broadly be seen as a more ‘impersonal’ style of painting in response to a universal dilemma: where does art situate itself between the world and our perception of it?
