Alex Hollinshead

I have always had a love for the baroque painters and old masters and contemporary painters who, in my opinion create vigorous flesh on canvas. The ideas of using heavy impasto in an almost sculptural way fascinate me. I wanted to see if I could incorporate this style with the ideas of deconstructive art. After seeing a john Deacon show and the architectural show at the RA, I started to wonder about how artists use negative space in paintings and how it could be connected through an “Abstract line”. I start with images I have taken of nudes, I get them to lay in traditional poses and overlay the same image however move only an arm or a hand or a leg ever so slightly to give the illusion of movement. This idea of movement sets the stage for lines to careen from the nude into negative space therefore linking it with the background. I kept the idea of an abstract line in mind, using oil, charcoal, pencil and house hold paint, I use mixed media as it adds to this furious battle on the paper. Lines failing everywhere ambiguous signs of body parts drips and scratches set the composition and in the middle the figure almost being enveloped by this abstract nature. I create paintings where the figure is almost enveloped in pieces of deconstructed renaissance paintings sometimes the nude is obvious sometimes it blends into abstract ambiguity and other times the viewer is puzzled to what is the back ground and what is the foreground. I use ideas of complex fragility through abstract expressionism and modern ideas of flesh. The ideas of being alone in modern societies set an ethos to pieces.