Connection Print

Joe Newcombe (b.1994, California) is an American-Swedish visual artist who explores human emotion and life experiences through painting. Newcombe’s work centers on evocative depictions of people, often focusing on facial expressions, and more abstract, gestural patterns that reinforce the emotional dynamic. Each one starts with a matching up of words, colors and emotions to set the course of the piece. He utilizes a variety of techniques through a diverse drawing and painting practice. These include quick line sketches in pen that show an interaction between people or an interaction of identity and text, which can be seen as route maps to navigate through ideas for larger paintings. He also uses pencil, charcoal, pastel and felt tip pen to bring color into his smaller works. Color is used as both immersive backdrop and meaningful highlights including red lips within contorted faces and multi-hued streams of energetic thoughts, or hair, flowing out of heads. In large scale works on canvas, he uses acrylic, at times revisiting the surface to introduce scraped or overlaid linear components. Using an intuitive drawing style, his line is energetic and, despite the very strong figurative elements, often his compositions are crisscrossed with additional grids and shapes giving a fractured impression hinting at both a complex world situation and conflicted interior life.