method23-stcwr

My colourful figurative paintings are about fiction and reality. I employ bold colours and expressive mark making in my paintings to help to convey a sense of heightened reality, these vivid colours are inspired in part by memories of a childhood growing up in Southern California.

This heightened reality also helps to elicit the feeling of being in an imaginary place and time that rubs up against our own reality. When making my work I try and achieve a visceral reaction through my handling of the paint, I will often use very thick paint but over the top of much thinner layers, allowing some of the early layers to show through in places which suggests the weakening of the veil between this fictional reality and our own. 

Significant areas of the painted surface are distressed through rubbing back, smearing and scraping to further reinforce the idea of the painting as a fictional place, a state of unreality. I have also begun to add cut out wooden shapes to my paintings, these shapes can be added within the conventional surface of the work or added on to the edge so that the subject of the painting can be reaching beyond the edge of the canvas. This additional dimension further disrupts the reality of the painting.