Tag: contemporary painting

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in focus

In Focus: You Can’t take it with you

Around 2009 I began experimenting with Photoshop as a means to develop a more experimental approach to composition and colouring, that was not so much reliant on the strictures of reality. The digital montages I produced often served as a model for painting. My aim was not to replicate a smooth photographic surface, but to treat the montage as any other 3D subject to work from.

  • You can’t take it with you (blue)
  • You can’t take it with you (green)

My thematic approach to building these images was based on the still life tradition, particularly memento mori. The two paintings in focus here were based on combining found images of skulls with my own photographs of coins, illustrating the anti-hoarder maxim of “you can’t take your money with you when you die”.

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new additions

Paintings added

The following paintings have been added to the gallery of available artwork. These paintings were produced during a period where I would combine found images to suggest new meanings and narratives, replicating elements of digital image manipulation by hand such as layering and transparency.

Email matthewgwells@outlook.com with any enquiries.

  • Debord, oil on canvas, 30 x 30cm
  • Melancholy, oil on canvas, 30 x 30cm
  • Fertility and decay, oil on canvas, 30 x 30cm
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in focus

In Focus: Cannibalising Courbet #3

The first of a new category of blog post, in which an available painting is picked out for discussion.

Cannibalising Courbet 3, 30 x 30cm, £125

Around 2016 I began a series of paintings combining elements of Courbet paintings into new compositions, and borrowing his motifs but recasting myself into the title role.

On the one hand this was a concerted effort to learn about the artists method of constructing images, from composition to lighting, tonality and colour, but was also a means of using previously existing imagery to construct a new narrative.

Very often I would choose a Courbet painting featuring one or more women, and combine it with a self portrait. This evokes themes of lust, longing and romance, but also the relationship but artist and model.

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