Simon Naish

Born in 1970, Simon Naish is an artist and painter based in Manchester.My work is a hybrid of pop art sensibilities and narrative figure painting, exploring the intersection between traditional painting techniques and contemporary forms of representation.My imagined histories are painted on large scale canvases; mock-epics which reflect a broad range of influences from literature and mythology to more contemporary visual sources.Influenced strongly by art-classical themes and motifs and subverting the scale, immediacy and coherent narrative inherent within comic book storytelling, the paintings are labour intensive and large in scale, undercut with an element of humour which characterises much of my work. Abstract elements are combined with the figurative in a form of painted collage which exaggerates the artifice of the subject matter in order to heighten the sense of the unreal. Playful images of innocence are cast against a backdrop of bodily motifs and themes of violence, dispossession and discord reflecting a sense of menace and unease.

BA (Hons) Reading University