Let's Go!

The blue figure in ‘Let’s Go!’, invokes an impish and mythic, sprite-like energy. They point away from themself and the viewer, while also looking back towards us, sharing a call to move deeper into virtual space. As a title, 2021’s 'Let's Go!’ embodies its own departure from the more vulnerably named and related work ‘Don’t Leave Me’, made in 2016. ‘Let's’ calls for collective action, towards somewhere we will enthusiastically go together. The two titles reflect my own spiritual and psychological shifts in perspective, moving from insecurity to an increasing self-confidence via a revitalised relationship to art. As I have shifted and embraced life, so too does the perspective of the roaming virtual camera here. Creating an effect that accentuates the experience of depth and dimensionality in art’s tradition of painting for the viewer. 'Let’s Go!' is the moving counterpart to ‘Don’t Leave Me’, a distinct work and digital painting, printed on linen, that was first exhibited and sold in my 2016, solo exhibition ‘Healing With Wounds’. The show took place at Somerset House in London. It was there that I first shared the figurative and gestural, computer generated, printed paintings that I had been developing for the past two years in my studio. At the same time, I shared separate digital counterparts, like this one, of the same imagery, animated by moving cameras, on Instagram. These digital and painterly explorations of virtual space allow the viewer to enter and move through the free floating space I paint in. It also helped them to understand more of what they were looking at when viewing the printed works. Technically, I start with real paint and photograph my own brushstrokes and then cut them out. I combine the images of paint in 3D painting software on the surface of virtual models of human bodies that I have carefully composed. I then finally render and retouch to complete the images, before minting or printing.