Simply put my work can be summed up in a Slim Aarons quote: “attractive people
doing attractive things in attractive places.’’
I like
photographs of leisure scenes like those by Slim Aaron, vintage travel and
holiday postcards from the 50s and 60s.
I use these kinds of images as well as my own personal bank to make my paintings.
I am drawn to the mix of nostalgia and ‘Luxe,
calme et volupté’ in these depictions of
leisure. Here is a place where people are partly naked, relaxed and often unaware
of themselves and being natural.
I don't slavishly
copying photos as to me this is most often a banal meaningless practice. I am
generally reflecting on a scene, enhancing and manipulating the image from the original
source changing it to closer relate to what I think of as a purer more direct feeling
about the subject.
The beach scene
and other social settings form a backdrop to my own meditation on what
constitutes ‘leisure’ time and how within that time and space I can focus more
easily and clearly on expressions of social and personal emotional dynamics. In
this sense I feel I am more of a traditionalist as I attempt to relate back to
painting history and pull away from the other media -film and photo- which
ironically inform and are almost always the starting point of my work.
On a formal
level I am currently focussed on extending and strengthening my colour palette,
for example in many of the scenes I will incorporate primary and complementary
colour dynamics - cool versus warm– to create spacial tension the way Richard
Diebenkorn was able to so successfully; a large ocean/pool blue or tree green
punctuated by a small area of skin tone or a bright red or yellow umbrella or
swimming suit.
I find in much
of my painting I cannot easily separate nostalgia for a bygone era, the sensual
from more specific contemporary iconography of human interaction. I think this
makes the subject-matter multi-layered and keeps me interested in making work. Hopefully
it makes it more interesting to the viewer as well.
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