John Mcnamara

I investigate the relationship between painting and photography, through making paintings that engage photography as a hidden, painted element. Since the photography literally exists beneath the surface, there is a strange conceptual ambiguity relational to the frozen moment of a person, place, or thing lying underneath the interpretive nature of the painting process. In a number of my paintings, I use photographs of people who are doing things in different parts of the world on a particular day. In others, I may take people of roughly the same age, but coming from different decades, and fuse them into the painted reality. I see my approach as having a "time machine" aspect. The content of my work focuses on conceptions of transcendence, moments in collective popular culture, and sharable life realities. I start a painting by choosing images that speak to one another. I configure the position of the images, glue and seal them to the panel, and begin painting. The intuitive and conceptual placement of the images offers me a point of departure that allows exploration/interpretation through the painting process, which in turn allows me to investigate conceptual meaning. I take great interest in developing and resolving content based f...