PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
If Caravaggio, Cher Lloyd and Instagram reels had a baby, I’d like to think I would be it, or at least meet it.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
I work a lot from photo reference screenshots from old YouTube videos, catalogues of football teams from 80’s north Yorkshire, postcards, model railway leaflets. But really they are secondary to a feeling I’m trying to articulate - using the photos as a sort of visual alphabet. When the right combination of images are collated on a canvas, I know it. Its a feeling and it feels great. Usually for me when I’ve done this successfully the painting feels like its squaring up to me before swiftly telling me its only joking and bringing me in for a hug. Like that friend that’s always joking but also always telling the truth.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
My art is really just how I see the world. It’s how I behave. It’s obnoxious sometimes, it tries very hard to entertain and shed the shame of itself. My paintings are never without a deep underlying existential dread either - I’m never not in the mood for the big questions, annoyingly. Painting is by nature a polite art form. It doesn’t move and doesn’t make any noise, in a lot of ways it is antithetical to who I am but I think that’s where I find the joy. If the job of a painting is to catch the eye, then the genius lies somewhere between not relying on shock value but having the confidence to provoke. I believe it is the painters job to enforce deliberation.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Andy Kauffman