Artist Statement

My preferred medium is painting, but my work most often contains a sculptural or video element. Although I tend to paint in a realistic painterly manner, I constantly rethink the notion of “The painting” and the limitations of the medium. I believe paint can reveal meaning in the seemingly meaningless, and value in the valueless.

I am fascinated by the fine balance between control, and uncontrollability, order and chaos, and figuration and its negation that comes into play when painting an image. I often reinvestigate and reinterpret the tradition of genre painting and my work often consists of multiple smaller fragments as opposed to single monumental pieces. Rather than competing with photography in order to create hyper realistic paintings, I explore and embrace painting’s own inherent language and marks.

My subject matter is usually of a mundane, everyday and familiar nature. The scenes and objects which I paint, evoke a sense of familiarity in most viewers as it is taken from most-travelled paths, everyday routines and objects or backgrounds of well-known film scenes.

I recently started to investigate the animation possibilities of painting. Fragmenting a video into frames, and painting each frame separately, is a tedious and primitive method of animation, although it results in a series of metamorphic paintings with interesting repetition and subtle changes, and a hypnotic and visually dynamic film. It reveals the sleight of hand of the painter, and allows the viewer to mentally fill the gaps between the painted frames as they reel on the screen. This approach allows me to create three dimensional and moving portraits, non-still still lives and rhythmic movements and cycles.