Over on Twitter yesterday I posted a series of tweets that, merged together, went something like this: What I need is Brighton people who will dress up in masks like those in the photo [above] and these, and be filmed doing some sort of dark folk-horror dance/performance art/ritual. Performers…
January is two-thirds gone, but things are coming together. I just received an email from my printers: the books of my artwork have been printed, and I just have to wait for them to bind them and deliver them now. I’m hoping they’ll arrive next week, at which point I’ll be selling them…
Photographs taken from the edge of the wood at midnight is the title I finally decided on for my set of 4 photographs (taken at various shoots between 2013 and 2015). Like many things, it came to me as an off-hand remark that later coalesced into the best title for the set. The set contains…
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The “Moss Figure” is an image that’s been haunting my mind since I was a child. The original inspiration was a reproduction of a Cibachrome print by Veruschka Forest-piece at Schnaitsee, Performance I, 1972 which I saw in a newspaper’s Sunday supplement magazine as an 8-year-old boy.…
I started making the Bark Mask back in 2012, and used the early version in a series of photographs (Bark Mask 01, Bark Mask 02, Bark Mask 03). It started from a shop-bought papier-mâché mask blank and two large sections of tree bark scavenged from two felled trees. After undercoating the…
On Monday I took the day off from my day job to get some artwork done. The first half of the session was spent doing three 40-minute life drawings, working in compressed charcoal on large (565mm × 760mm) sheets of paper. Charcoal is less forgiving of mistakes than pencil—you can’t erase…
I recently bought this rather creepy “blank” bird mask by Seattle-based artist Cassandra Mélena. My plan is to paint and decorate the mask to use in another series of mythologically-inspired photographs in the same style as my Blindfolded Seeress, Death Mask, Badb Catha/Crow Mask, and Bark…
I wrote about the more philosophical side of masks in a previous blogpost Masks, Deception, and Truth. This post is more about the history of masks. Get yourself comfortable - this one could go on for a bit: An introduction and some politics When using masks in artwork, the obvious initial…
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Looking back on my photographic work since 2012 I’ve got to the point now where I feel I’ve amassed a good range of these pseudo-mythological characters. There are probably a couple more female characters to do, then I will turn my attention to the male characters. …
I was asked recently why I used masks that are obviously masks in my photographs, rather than using some digital manipulation to produce monstrous photo-realistic visages like those produced by special effects in films and TV. The thing is that I like masks, I like the…