Pulp Fiction and Film Noir

These are a series of paintings and drawings appropriated from film noir stills and pulp fiction covers.

There are strong formal concerns with his paintings, building up 30, 40 or more layers of paint to impart a rich sense of color and luminosity. Crimsons and cool pinks are interwoven with warmer reds, ultramarine with prussian blues, the shadows are made of dark olive greens and deep earth reds and so on.

The decontextualisation of the image, the use of shadows and sfumato in the paintings, and the manner in which the works on paper are alternatively drawn and then erased to give them a sense of being eroded in time reminiscent of early Renaissance frescos, fractures the narrative and lends it an ambiguity of meaning.

The result of this process are images with both impact and a sense of mystery which viewers can look at for a long time.