Photo by Street Art Atlas
In this weeks blog I want to talk a bit about the process behind getting the reference images for my paintings. When I first started painting I would just spend hours trawling the internet looking for images and then use them without realising I should probably be getting permission from the photographers! I eventually started getting permission but quickly found I was looking for more specific elements in my reference images. A lot of the images I had used in the past had been taken by the photographer Marc Hayden so I reached out to him to discuss working together. For the work in my previous style the photos required would involve lots of close up portraits in different poses usually taken in public places like cafes. I knew for my new work I wanted more control and had more specific ideas in mind.
After everything that had happened in 2019 and having experimented with my painting technique, I knew that I wanted to produce a body of work that explored the theme of loss and grief. I spent time coming up with ideas of how I could express my experiences through my painting. I came up with a series of reference ideas and contacted Marc to arrange a photoshoot. We hired a studio and created the backdrop for the images. This photoshoot centred around capturing the emotional impact of loss based on the physical expression of grief and how we interact with others. It was the most direct involvement I’d had in a photoshoot and provided the images for what I thought would make up my next exhibition.
Photo by Street Art Atlas
In March 2020 I started painting a mural for Extinction Rebellion in East Dulwich. This was the first mural I had painted in my new style. I used an image from the photoshoot I had done earlier in the year but, rolling back the years, I incorporated images of flowers I had found on the internet into the painting to represent my theme of life and death for this mural. It was painting these flowers that made me realise I could combine figurative painting with other elements. The mural was pretty abruptly stopped by lockdown 1 of many! This break from painting the wall gave me time back in the studio to reflect on what I wanted to do next. It’s from this mural that the idea for the second photoshoot came. I wanted to explore creating a set and bringing prop elements into the reference images. This photoshoot felt like another progression with more control over the realisation of my ideas. The idea behind this shoot was to create images for a second body of work, however after seeing all the images together it became clear they were all about the same thing!
