Untitled Painting

Jake Quinlan is a contemporary artist living and working in South Wales. His practice is based on the lifestyle and emotional state of the common workingman, expressed through gestural abstraction. Quinlan received a first-class-honours BA from the University of South Wales and was awarded a 2-year fellowship with 56 Group Wales, an exhibiting group of contemporary professional artists working across a wide range of media and concerns. In modern social climates, the common workingman continuously feels worthless and undervalued, often invisible to outer society. The struggle to provide a life and a sense of stability for loved ones all too often claims victims into the whirlpool of drink and cards. From my own experience, it feels like we fall into a catacomb of resentment toward ourselves and others. This chaos and desperation are what my work aims to capture. In the literal imagery, I use abstraction to record an expressive moment of angst and frustration that accumulates through the working week. I like to think of my paintings as artistic contradictions: marks rioting with anger and aggression, and overall compositions somehow sitting in an uncomfortable silence, absorbing you while simultaneously rejecting you. Combining various material types and applications, the paintings build until an initial emotion has exhausted itself. As soon as the painting is simultaneously intimidating and comforting to me, only then is it deemed a finished work.