Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
I was born in 2000 in Reading, which is a town just west of London, where I am now based. I recently graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting. I paint snapshots of a history that hasn’t quite happened. I often look to the past, patchworking together historical stories to build new ones that feel contemporarily relevant. I’m typically attracted to events that are bizarre, seemingly unexplainable, and apparently unique and attempt to find ways in which to weave them into broader contextual tapestries.
Are there any influences that are core to your work?
I’ve developed a style of painting that references one used by British artists in between the World Wars. After the First World War, there was a movement back towards life before it, painters choosing to depict scenes of country living and everyday moments in a seemingly old-fashioned manner. Although the images attempt to portray a world that has not changed, the pastoral subject matter is rendered in meticulous, hard-edged detail, as though the artists are obsessively trying to control and systematise the rapidly changing world around them. I’m fascinated by this era of painting, which went out of fashion very quickly due to its reliance on resurrecting the past rather than looking to the future. It seems appropriate to revisit the style now, a hundred years on, in the chaos of the 2020s.
Your work often follows tonal color palettes. How do you determine the composition of your palettes? Was tonality always a consideration in your practice, or has it developed over time?
For the last year or so I’ve been working in near-monochrome; I find it’s a nice way to get a sense of fog or age over an image. I mix my colours very carefully before I start painting with a relatively small difference between my lightest and darkest paints so I’m working a lot in that midtone area. I particularly enjoy using browns and greys – neutral colours that have a timeless quality – and finding ways to establish intensity with a palette that could be quite insipid. A typical palette appears very limited; it’s in applying it that requires a lot of play on its nuances. That’s the fun of colour theory to me – what was grey on the palette suddenly becomes white or pink or green or black in context. I really enjoy working out when I need to push or rein in those subtleties.
Your recent body of work has considered the wellness industry during the 20th century and alternative medical treatments. What led to your interest in these themes? Are there any connections you would draw from what’s depicted in this work to the varying sentiments that surround modern medicine in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’m in general very interested in scams, especially medical scams. Preying on people’s fear of illness – a fear of illness being a fear of the uncontrollable nature of mortality – is obviously disgusting, but unfortunately common. My current body of work is centred around the story of Starvation Heights, an American treatment centre that promised a ‘natural’ cure to all manner of ailments run in the early 1900s by alternative healer Linda Hazzard. Hazzard’s treatment was essentially an extreme version of a juice cleanse, subjecting her patients to multiple weeks’ long fasts from which many died by starvation. Although many have written off Hazzard’s motivations as purely monetary, with accusations of overcharging and proof of theft uncovered in investigations, it seems she was convinced of her methods, following them to her own death by starvation in 1938. The story fascinates me because I think so much of it comes down to desperation in attempting to be the master of your own body and health. It’s not dissimilar to the conversation around vaccines we’ve seen reawakened in recent years. Vaccines have been scientifically proven to help limit the spread of and even eradicate disease; this is unquestionably beneficial to public interest. However, there’s a desire to hold your health in your own hands, and, unfortunately, the difficult historical (and contemporary) political purview over bodily autonomy has cultivated distrust towards governmental agendas and modern medicine. It’s that idea of a sort of misled desperation that I suppose is underpinning my current work.
Your work has a distinct style of compressing and distorting spatial perspective and rendering the features of figurative subjects with seemingly soft edges. Were there any formative influences to developing this style?
My main influences are the aforementioned interwar British Realists like Stanley Spencer, Edward Burra, Winifred Knights as well as German painters from around the same time like George Grosz and Otto Dix. All of these used unnatural and often awkward perspectives to build an atmosphere of there being something slightly off or not right about a scene. Another important reference to my recent still life work has been Konrad Klapheck; he had this way of portraying everyday objects with this masochistic tightness. He would warp something as ordinary as a typewriter or an iron into some fascist, imposing monument.
The figurative subjects in your compositions appear firmly set in the past, whether that be because of their wardrobe, their surroundings, or their activities. How do you consider your role as a world-builder when painting figurative subjects in novel environments?
I always gravitate towards historical narratives rather than contemporary ones as I think the distance from the sort of controversial events I am often drawn to allows you to view them away from personal bias and with a little more nuance, from which parallels can then be drawn to our present day. The majority of the world I depict in my paintings is set in an imagined 1900-1939 Britain, a period overshadowed by war and dread as well as hope in the massive social change it catalysed. I’m not bound to accuracy in my worldbuilding, however, and I like an occasional 21st century anachronistic slip up to break through the period façade.
Are there any areas of research that you are interested in taking your work further?
The outcome of my current research into early 20th century wellness centres is a series of paintings depicting the sort of strained soups they’d use to breakfast on the programmes. I’d like to look more into food production and the role of nature in this era overshadowed by Industrialism and war. The centres I’ve been investigating would often market themselves as spaces to escape from the modern world and reconnect with the earth; I think I’d like to explore that kind of idea of living in nature being this cultivated, commodified image.
Describe your current studio or workspace.
I’m actually just about to move studios for the second time this year… I was in my university studio for the first half of the year and then moved to my new space, but we just received notice on that to be out by the end of October. I’m going to be moving in with some other painters from uni, which I’m excited about. Being around other makers changes the energy of a space; it’s motivating to work around other people and have those other perspectives to bounce off of.
Do you have any rituals when you arrive to your studio/workspace?
The way I work is relatively simple and regimented. I paint for the most part on small canvases on the easel, just using oil paint, linseed oil, a bit of tissue paper, and a couple of brushes. I like working in long sittings if I can, ideally getting into studio early in the morning and then staying late into the evening, and I focus on one painting at a time, slowly and precisely.
What is your experience like as an artist living and working in London?
London is great for being surrounded by so many galleries and museums – being able to just go and see art is such a privilege. Similarly, it’s also so nice to feel like you’re part of a community here where there are so many artists around. The flipside of this – art in the UK feeling so centralised around London – is it’s so expensive here. It doesn’t feel like a very democratic space when it takes so much money to be an artist here.
Interview conducted by Luca Lotruglio.