Premio Combat Prize

Portraiture and life painting have been my favoured subjects for a number of years. In early 2013 I decided to revisit my “Relationships Series” of paintings, and it has since become the main focus of my work.
I have always been interested in the relationship between the artist, the model and the viewer. The “Relationships Series” evolved from a number of figure studies that I was working on from 2005. With this work I have attempted to explore the relationships between two figures within a composition, in both a spatial and an emotional sense, whilst also looking at the idea of nudity, as compared with nakedness or self-consciousness. I became fascinated with how the addition of a second figure within a composition transforms these relationships, often introducing a sense of nakedness – compelling the viewer to install a narrative (often with a sexual element), regardless of the Artist’s design; the emotional or psychological relationship between the figures almost writes itself.