Crop. Unrecognisable. Flesh. Zoom. Thick. Wrinkle. Pink. Disfigure. Crease. Squash.

I chose this painting from my contemporary project to represent my practice. It is a painting of a very zoomed in photograph of my hand. I chose this painting because it’s subject of flesh, and hands in particular, is something that appears consistently throughout my personal work, whether it is painting, drawing, or even embroidery.

For this painting I used oil paint, which has become my preferred choice of paint to work with in the past years because of the way it’s so easy to manipulate, blend and layer. I’ve recently began to experiment with the thickness of the paint I use in my paintings to create texture to my work. This painting is one of my more successful examples of that. I’ve also been experimenting with colours and the decision to choose only one as the main colour, such as blue or pink, and then working within their tonal spectrums; similar to monochrome, which I use in my drawings where it is just black and white. Again this painting is an example of that.

I would like to continue this style of painting and experiment and explore with the idea of zoomed in photographs to the point where they appear almost unrecognisable. The scale of the painting, being a small squared canvas also, for me, almost suggests it has been taken from a larger painting. Therefore if I was to continue this project I would like to do a series of paintings like this one but from different sections of the hand to create this idea that it’s some kind of puzzle. Also this idea of taking something so common and beautiful as the human hand/body and turning it into something unidentifiable and almost grotesque is something that I think would be fun and interesting to explore further.