These earlier oil paintings record Berlin rooms, nightlife and the long effort to understand how a hand changes the emotional temperature of a picture.
Older work still has a place in the archive
These paintings are not a new collection. I made them over several years while learning what I wanted painting to do, watching the people and rooms around me and trying to make an image hold more than a quick impression.
They are oil paintings on canvas, board or paper. Some are portraits. Some stay close to a hand, table, drink or body. Others are harder to place. Together they record a period of looking, testing and returning to the same problems from different directions.
The work is older, but it shows the route into the paintings I am making now.
Watching Berlin
I was a voyeur of Berlin in the practical sense. I watched the city as a source of images: people in bars, at tables, in studios, at parties, in temporary rooms and in the quieter spaces around a night out. I noticed what people reveal when they are not presenting themselves for a portrait.
Berlin's subcultural life gave me complicated scenes. The city is not only clubs and nightlife, and nightlife is not only entertainment. It is where people meet, perform themselves, disappear, make connections and build small worlds that may not exist elsewhere.
Painting from that position meant being close enough to observe but not always close enough to explain. The paintings hold onto that distance. They are intimate, but they are not neutral.
The room is in the hands
Hands kept returning because they carry so much information. A hand can show how someone holds a glass, hides a face, touches another person, protects themselves, waits, smokes, eats or tries not to be seen.
In several of these paintings, the hands are more direct than the faces. They give away the social situation and interrupt the image. A hand across a face changes a portrait. A hand on a table changes the relationship between people in a room. Painted fingers can make the whole picture feel exposed.
Hands are difficult to paint
I wanted to get better at painting hands because they are hard to fake. A face can survive approximation. A hand usually cannot. Proportion, joints, pressure and position all have to make sense at once.
That difficulty gave me a reason to keep painting them. I was not pursuing technically perfect hands for their own sake. I wanted to understand how a gesture changes the emotional temperature of an image and can control its entire composition.
Some hands work more successfully than others. That is why I want the older work visible. It shows the practice being built, rather than only the moments that already look resolved.
Painting the social body
The people in these works are rarely isolated from their surroundings. Drinks, jewellery, tables, clothing, animals, walls and fragments of rooms enter with them. The body is social before it is symbolic. It carries evidence of where it has been and who else is nearby.
That is why the paintings move between portraiture and scene painting. I am interested not only in who someone is, but in what happens around them, what they do with their body and how a room changes the way they can be seen.
Available originals from an earlier period
A selection of these earlier oil paintings is still available. They are available originals from the archive, not a new release or a replacement for the next collection.
The next collection is developing now. These works remain open as a record of the years that made that direction possible.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona studio editorial based on the artist's earlier oil paintings and studio notes.