Shard Painting

My art largely focuses on portraits as I believe that faces embody a person’s life story, current emotions and thoughts. When I consider an image of someone, sometimes it hits me that it should become a painting, and I start wanting to put the face onto canvas. In some ways, each portrait is its own odyssey: I start with an image that triggers some emotions, which brings different colours, textures, and abstractions to mind. The result is always beyond what I had foreseen. In my artworks, my consideration is how abstraction meets realism to represent a contemporary modern vision. In order to achieve these visions, I paint some of my portraiture as realistic, and let other parts become transformed with bold, colourful brush strokes and gestural knife marks. These destructive or disfiguring processes gives me the freedom to be playful, experimental and fluid. This process create a sensory experience where the figure is swaying, or alive, to suggest that time is flowing and we are always on the move. By transforming the subject matter, I hope you, the viewer, may recognize this motion and come to notice your own subconscious unfolding onto the canvas. I paint with a wide brush across of some parts of my paintings with calligraphic gesture, and blur some figuration or smear some parts with a painting knife. I like the possibilities of having control but also having some things not under control. By doing so, my intention is to represent flowing time, sway, and uncertainty. It is notable how all my portraits are of faces, yet they all resemble myself, as I might be projecting my own emotions and soul. Some people form the impression that these portraits look somewhat sad; we are all temporary beings, and everything fades away over time.