I am painter, working on a large-scale in mixed media or oils using figurative themes. Currently I make large-scale expressive paintings based on photographs by other artists like Francesca Woodman (photographer), Bill Viola and Sam Taylor-Wood (video artists) who directly reference classical themes (i.e. St Sebastian etc) and the works of classical artists (i.e. Titian). I appropriate their images and rework them in a new manner so they become mine, but with an echo of their origin.
I also work from photographic portraits of well-known artists, often from the front cover of ‘Modern Painters’ magazine. My Painting of Tuymans was in direct response to his own particular artistic investigation and offered the potential for many new layers of meaning; Tuymans makes his own ambiguous, powerful paintings often borrowing from found photographs showing details from significant moments in history.
Working directly from other artists’ photographs using paint raises questions of authorship; can a contemporary artist ever be ‘original’ or ‘new’ as our media-driven culture seems to require? It also questions the nature of representation; what’s being represented, the subject/image, the process of translation, or the photograph itself as a material object? This process also highlights a self-conscious move away from the digitised photographic image towards a material ‘experience’.