Painting Practice: Tools & Techniques

As a hyperrealist, something should also be said on the technical matter of creating my paintings. I began my early work in portraiture, having a fascination for the qualities of the Old Flemish Masters. The qualities of human skin, how it emanates light and how it has a strange translucent quality, are properties beautifully evoked by the layered indirect painting process. In my own portraits I adopted several of the techniques used by the old masters. I would build up the skin and flesh of the sitter using many layers: from an initial drawing, to an umber layer, followed by a grisaille underpainting. Then I would bring the subject to life in colour using multiple layers of glazing. When this process is followed correctly, a truly luminous quality of skin is obtained. This technical approach to portraiture was something I began to transfer to a number of my still-life paintings. It was clear that fruit had many of the same properties as human skin. A grape seemed to emit and radiate light as readily as the glowing skin of a young girl.

The technical aspects of my painting practice have rarely remained constant. Rather I choose to use an ever-changing process of searching and evolving to suit which ever series of paintings I’m working on. As a hyperrealistic painter there is a constant drive to get closer to the heightened reality of the objects: to delve deeper into the beauty of these micro worlds; to draw out an object’s hitherto concealed treasures, and to exaggerate its reality such that it comes out of the canvas.

Like many artist, tools and techniques are everything to me. I’m constantly exploring new approaches to achieve my visions. Each element of a painting – be it the veins of a leaf or a droplet of water, the translucent properties of grapes, or the textures of a sea shell, or in fact any of the other hundreds of distinct passages which run through my paintings – demands a particular tool, technique or approach. A single passage in a painting may require much searching and experimenting, but this is what keeps the creative process alive and fascinating and ever evolving into new realms.

Amidst the fascination for technical processes, there remains an obsession for the seductive properties of objects. These seductive properties are never pursued to the point of eroticisation. The sensual properties of fruit for example, naturally and simply reveal their subtle relationships with the human body. This in turn evokes a natural sensual quality. This sensuality I perceive in organic inanimate objects is exquisitely tied up with the beauty I perceive in them. Beauty and sensuality unite and are inseparable.

What makes my still-life paintings (if indeed they can be called still-life) contemporary, is the appearance of glass in each and every painting, and the psychological ramifications of using this material. This psychological aspect insists that my paintings transcend the quaint sensibilities found in the common traditions of the genre. In effect, I am extracting what I take to be the best of the genre – sensuous fruit and organic materials – and placing them in a context with a strong psychological underpinning. This psychological aspect never reveals itself in the work, as nothing can get in the way of the pure expression of beauty. But it is there, and remains the driving force throughout my work.