Statement for Fashion Shop

For many years I was a painter, drawing upon the swoops and curves I saw in calligraphy and blending them with a purposeful, flat approach to colour more often seen in commercial art or animation than in painting. I use long-bristled lining brushes and, bracing my hand as with a mahl stick, my aim is to freeze solid onto canvas the lilting cadences of music.

More recently, I have taken to tracing my paintings, using Bézier curves, into vector graphics – making them infinitely scalable and adjustable. In recent years, my focus has been on these vectors and their many uses. It takes me roughly twice as long to trace a painting as it does to paint the original and during the process I refine and adjust line and shape until they are like the platonic shadow-casters of the original works.

I used these vectors first to make wall art, often creating many colour variations from a single original piece. Later I used them to illustrate books, writing two of these in an alphabet traced into its digital form from rough pencil sketches. However, the vector format allows me to do far more than reproduce these images on prints and books – now the time has come to put these images onto the greatest canvas of all: the human body.