Go to Instagram to see all my latest art – anything there can be bought, just contact me.
My art is about dealing With trauma (my photography is less angsty – it’s about flashes of beauty we miss in the world) I suffered horrendously in 2018, being critically ill and worse, and losing friends and family who seemed to decline to speak to me or visit me. When I needed human contact, I got very little.
Isolation and trauma is potentially a killer in their own right so instead of getting depressed, I channelled the trauma and shock into my work. Using the materials I had at hand, a SurfacePro, a phone and a pencil (no messy media in hospital), I started to create anti-selfies. These anti-selfies show only the worst of my internal emotional state, as opposed to normal selfies that people curate to show how cool they are. Sometimes these were created or started in the cold desperate hours of night and sometimes at the moments when my situation hot me full on.
They are produced from pencil sketches or selfie photos, I run them then through some code to move the pixels about, then I paint into them on the PC and then I filter them as selfies are. Once that is done, I produce a unique print onto canvas and frame it in a distressed frame, creating perfect simulacra.
The visual language I use is that of northern European expressionism. That work is mired in the angst and the internal scream. There is a ready made visual language of expression that I was able to utilise to communicate.
It then becomes a one off unique computational/digital painting.
A viewer at the gallery pulled me aside and said, “That painting there, that white one, is how I felt when my son died.”
