My work

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This post is about my Modern Beauty exhibition, details of which can be found here.

The work I do is aimed at you.

I don’t make it for galleries and dealers, but that, of course, is where they have to be displayed in order to be seen and so after a long break, I return to the world of exhibitions and galleries.

The work in this exhibition is but a small selection of work that I have made on my travels. In the last seven years, I have commuted about 1.1 million miles and I always have a camera with me. In more recent years I have had my trusty SurfacePro with me and that has allowed me to record what I see and to render it so that the story of the piece is conveyed.

The works are hybrids of photography and painting created using digital technologies. Most of the images you see are taken on the iPhone. Yes, my iPhone. That little device in your pocket is capable of recording a magical world of beauty and wonder. Often I take an image and work into it with painting and natural media software. Sometimes I push filters to their limits and other times I apply traditional darkroom techniques digitally. You can see more hybrid works here.

For most people, the smartphone has become a new set of senses, a connector to the world and is both support mechanism and guide. By using it to make art we, artist and consumer, inhabit parts of the same connected universe. The future is shiny tech-bright. Digital is changing art more than the invention of oil painting did, computation and AI will change it even more. Even though I have been working with computers and art since 1990 (yes, 1990), I am still excited to be working in this arena, even in such a small way.

The job of an artist is to see things that others don’t and to render them understandable in ways that delight, depress and fascinate an audience, depending on the subject. If it doesn’t move or excite or intrigue you, it’s probably not art you want to own.

Each one of my pieces come with a story, a human story. Even the most abstracted pieces are a representation of my emotional response to something that I see or feel.

Beauty, it is often said, is in the eye of the beholder, but I believe most people need glasses to see it fully. The role of the artist is to be those glasses.

Come along, I hope you’ll enjoy it.