Artist Statement
My work engages traditional painting and the stylistic strategies of contemporary
advertising to generate familiar but incongruous figurative paintings. My work is
broadly inspired by the vanity of portrait painting and similar methods of external
identity construction in the habitual pursuit of beauty.
Beginning from a reaction to images produced by the media and fashion industry,
I conflate the cultural, commercial and personal through a process of painting and
collaging images. Influenced by celebrity crisis and obsession, plastic surgery, and
the fashion industry, I paint to convey the anxiety of continual mediation. Limbs
distort, paint melts into skin and glances confront in discord to suggest different
states of psychic disintegration. Using painterly contradictions of strength and
vulnerability, attraction and repulsion my work is a depiction of the space between
desire and disappointment.