Usually starting from photographic source, whether individually created or sourced from third-parties, I begin with constructing a 3D digital sculpture of the subject and environs. Once this mesh is created, I add appropriately unrealistic materials (for example: ultra-reflective flesh) and light the scene cinematically with full ray-tracing using 3D rendering software. This creates the ‘naked’, abstract scene with realistic lighting that I use as a basis for the painting. After this begins the process of adding multiple layers of hand-painted digital layers using custom brushes on a graphics tablet to gradually edge the naked scene to a level of realism, adding along the way a range of fantastical elements such as custom jewellery and background depth layers, imagined clothing (some of which are cloth-modelled using the physics engine of the rendering software) and further, multiple layers of additional specular highlights from imagined (unrealistic) lighting.

My work revolves around the tension created by the juxtaposition of traditional modes of 2D representation – the application of paint marks to a surface and digital 3D representation – which is modern and computer-enabled. By subverting and combining them, pushing at and playing with our notions of real and unreal, I feel that they arrive in a zone of uncertainty and ‘wrongness’ that simultaneously also seems real – an analogue to the human experience of the world being a product of an unknowable quantum ‘true’ reality. The naming of them as paintings, despite not ‘existing’ in the traditional sense, is part of that deliberate creation of uneasiness and discomfort in the viewer to mimic the underlying structure of the universe.

Protest and fight moments are from the very edges of experience – of placing yourself in real danger either through political desperation or the thrill of combat – these moments are a condensing of time, experience and even destiny into instances of extreme human experience of the world, and unreal to normalised experience for the majority of humans. Highlighting these moments, through a process of deconstructing and reconstructing with fantasy and error, and a clash of realism and total lack of realism creates an unnerving tension, unsettling and intriguing the viewer. The series of portraits are more superficially sedate, but allow for a hyper-detailed investigation of my overall aims of representing the nature of the illusion of human experience versus the underlying quantum reality of existence.

Each image is created in either landscape or portrait format in extra large 16k scale (11200 × 16000 pixels) at 300dpi to ensure accurate and detailed print reproduction, even to extremely large print sizes.

I print using only a high-quality, 12-colour ink giclee process on heavyweight Hahnemuhle archival stock. The ink lightfastness is guaranteed for 80 years +, so the colour will essentially never fade.Each print run for a painting is limited to a maximum of 20 signed editions.