XS
Photography studios are zones of transition, where strangers gather briefly but intensely. For half my life they were my world. I came to realise that fashion shoots are fertile ground for paintings of intimacy and drama, tension and ennui.
S
The paintings almost all start with a gesture, often of tenderness or vulnerability and the composition builds around that. I can’t articulate the emotional pull of those gestures but they are the crux of the paintings.
M
As to the narrative or events within, I know no more than the viewer; I deliberately avoid resolving the puzzle, preferring the sense of ambiguity and the absence of narrative closure.
L
There is of course, a splendid perversity in spending weeks rendering in painfully slow analogue, a world that is inherently fastpaced and digital.
XL
Because I remain invested in the aesthetics and semiotics of fashion, there’s a lot of clothes interest: Prada stripes, a lot of Aje, a sweary Vetements sweatshirt, some Fyodor Golan, Christopher Kane, a Dion Lee corset and so on.
Those titles
It seems most artists hate titles. They’re difficult to choose and misjudged, they can be pretentious or boring; while a literal title deflates and undermines a painting.
So instead I have, lovingly, brought into (or ‘appropriated’ in artspeak) each painting a figure or gesture from someone else's picture and titled my painting after theirs.
Problem solved: once you know this, there’s no expectation of a relationship between word and picture and therefore no clues or prompts about the content. They are for you to read as you choose. And so I’ve liberated my paintings from the burden of their titles.
Plus, it allows me the pleasure of ‘a one-handed collaboration’ with those other painters. And sometimes just indulging in a cheap joke. Should they wish, the critical viewer can entertain him - or herself - tracking down the sources of these remixes. Like a kind of Appropriation Detective.
Get in touch
Comments, questions, visits, purchases?
Some of the paintings are still available, do get in touch if you’d like one. I’m really approachable.
The XS studies are from £200, Small paintings from £350, Medium from £1000, Large from £2200 and the remaining XL paintings are £7000.
I’m in Newark on Trent, UK. An hour and a bit north of London by train. It’s nice - you’d like it.
And yes. I do ship internationally!
mark@enstone.net