PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
I have a variety of influences, Paula Rego, Alice Neel, early Lucian Freud portraiture, John Currin and Egon Schiele come to mind with artistic influences and then I’m influenced a lot by film makers and writers because a lot of my work goes on the path of storytelling and I like my paintings to have an almost cinematic quality. Darren Aronofksy, Julia Ducournau, Jim Jarmusch’s Night on earth inspired the back seat of a car paintings in a way. Douglas Stuart’s storytelling, Sigmund Freud’s writing heavily influenced the psychoanalytic aspect of my work.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
I spend most of my process researching. I pick a topic I want to make a series out of and either conduct interviews or listen to a lot of material on the topic. I pin down at least 4 paintings I want to make from it and plan them out, pulling out source imagery from photography I like, film stills or even just found imagery and then combine them with my imagination to create the sketches for the paintings so the faces are this strange amalgamation of real and invented almost like when you dream or when you read a book and imagine the characters. I then make sure I’m happy with the sketches and draw everything on my wood or canvas to begin the painting.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
I want people to be active viewers. I don’t want to the work to be taken in passively as just that’s a nice painting there. There’s often an awkwardness and some might even say grotesque nature to the faces I paint but I think the point is for the viewer to try get deeper into what is going on internally and what the story of that person being painted is that they can get clues from the painting scene as a whole as well as the title but have to allow for their own interpretation as well based off their own life experiences.
PF: How important is the viewer’s interpretation versus your intention?
I don’t always expect the viewer’s interpretation to totally match my own but I quite like that. I like how a viewer can relate to a painting completely differently to another because of their own personal histories. Not everyone leads the same life and experiences and I think ultimately each person meshes their own life to what is put before them and so of course their interpretation would sometimes be different from my intention. I think it adds layer to the work.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Paula Rego. I find her work full of story telling and going to the underbelly of society and topics some might find unsettling but highly necessary to explore and discuss creatively. I’d literally want to spend hours talking about her abortion series and the entire process. Also we’d definitely chat over some incredible Portuguese food.