Drawing on paper has always been at the core of my practice. My earliest influences were torn between the ‘tight’ rendering of comics and graphic novels and the ‘loose’ rendering of illustrators like Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle.
This drawing is an attempt to bring those two approaches together into a work that is compositionally complex yet free in it’s mark making.
I recall seeing Veronese’s ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ at the National Gallery in London and being struck by it’s grandly structured composition. I find myself often trying to replicate something of that scale and gravitas in my own pictures.
Procession is influenced by the surreal decorations of 19th century circus wagons. I find their handcrafted pageantry speaks to a time when everyday people were much more reliant on their own faculties of fantasy and imagination.