Untitled Painting

There are signs. Signs that betray how hurt, fragile, or lost we all are. How you stand, the position of your hands, the almost undetectable micro expressions in your face. Even how your lips move as read this. They all tell a small fragment of your story. They all give the game away. Whether you like it or not, your outward appearance is a direct reflection of the decisions you've made in your life and the decisions you've allowed others to make for you. My work sets out to illustrate my own personal choices, fucked up or otherwise. As well as to document how other people seek to deceive each other in their dance to mask the what's really in their hearts. It was triggered by a glimpse in a crowded street of someone I knew at school. He looked 60. Which is fine if you're 70. But not if you're 40. I thought about the ton of crap life must have heaped on him that had turned him into the man I saw. He looked rough. I looked in the mirror and started to see how my choices had shaped my own physical appearance. I looked back over older works I had created and I realised that for years I had been hinting at these hidden states without consciously realising it. My current work illustrates this in a more direct way. Based on our day-to-day lives and the people we pass in the street without giving a second glance, this work hints at the choices they might have made whilst allowing you the viewer to contemplate how or why they may have made those choices. Hopefully it also provokes you into considering the decisions that have shaped you into the person standing here reading this now. And how desperately you're trying to hide the truth from the rest of us.