Art Is Made Here: Painting Local Artists

With the pandemic lockdown in 2020 I quickly created a structure to my days by doing a daily portrait drawing from online reference photos. Eighteen months later, I thought it might be more interesting to work from photos of local friends, and did the earliest, small mixed media pieces shown here. I always enjoy working on series, so started reaching out to local artists and decided to focus on oil painting moving forward.

Each painting has been quite a distinct process. There hasn’t ever been a conscious emulation of the subject’s own style. Having been given a reference photo, I needed to use each photo as a proxy for the human: how do *they* see themselves via this photo? Given the vagaries of photography, it’s often like gazing through distorted window glass to connect with the subject. There also develops partway through the portrait painting process a palpable tension between trying to be true to the likeness and surrendering purely to the act of picture-making.