The Dive Painting

My work examines the uneasiness of entertainment television. Its constant presence in the background of daily life has, over time, desensitised us to its inherent strangeness. Its hypnotic images inform our society almost without detection. Through the durational act of painting, I slow down these images in order to interpret them. I consider the way in which we suffer simultaneously from a fascination with alluring TV images, and a chronic separation from their aspirational ideals. The televisual reality is better than our reality: more exciting and more glamorous. It is a veritable Hyperreality that threatens to replace our reality with its own. However, the appealing other world of TV is confounded by its banality and the banality of watching. My paintings attempt to expose the TV as a mirror, reflecting the isolation and ennui of the habitual watcher. Illusionistic scenes from the screen are reduced to a mesmeric impression. They are an analogue record of the digital, replacing the hard, unchanging plastic screen with the gestural plastic of the painted surface. An array of uneven pointillist marks and bowing lines embody the feeling of being somehow both transfixed and distracted at the same time, as to give the television your attention necessitates that nothing else can truly have it. They are evocative of a prolonged watching, and the desire to not miss a moment, entirely captivated by a glowing screen.