Cap d'Ail Painting

A fine art graduate of Falmouth. Interested in drawing, painting and collage. The Salton Sea; a derelict and abandoned tourist destination, the largest water mass in California formed by flooding well bellow sea level. It rose to prominence in the 1950's as its bountiful fishing attracted tourists, bringing with them wealth and glamour. However, water run off from farming irrigation was the only source of new water causing the salinity and pollution to rise, killing most wildlife and eventually forcing the tourists away. Now the desolate remains of Motels, holiday homes and tourist attractions are the only reminders of this lost time. My work revolves around the idea of combining found images, usually figures and these deserted landscapes, in ways that alter the viewers perceptions of the human relationships within a pictorial space. I'm constantly collecting source material from film stills, the Internet, the news, media and any discarded images. I replace, impose, remove and compare multiple elements of the found images and layer them, paying close attention to complementary compositions or atmospheres. I manipulate the associations that the existing images bring with them, changing their meanings and exploring interactions between images. This is then developed further through a drawing and painting process. The abstract painterly qualities, which distort but also unify an otherwise disjointed collection of images, allow the possibility to adjust the emotion that is conveyed in its combination of elements. I play with warm and cool colours and the opacity or translucency of paint, pushing and pulling parts back and forward across the various combined picture spaces, sometimes working with the illusion of depth and sometimes against it. I have used images from natural disasters like the earthquake in Japan and from war torn countries like Libya and Iraq. There is a fear of danger, real or fictional, that has forced away the occupants leaving traces of the human interactions with the landscape. The overlaid figures reintroduce that lost human element, despite the fact they are only outlines, it gives the hint of the temporary, or removed figures, leaving impressions of where people once populated them. The images are a stark reminder of our fragility in a world that dwarfs us in scale.