Artist Statement: I have always been interested in drawing and painting the human face.
Since I was sixteen I have been painting oil portraits. This started with doing many commercial celebrity portraits in my teen years, then slowly changing my style into expressionistic thicker painted images during my college education.
When I was painting portraits of family and friends I was never satisfied with connecting the subject to the viewer. I never wanted to make emotional bonds with my work, so I was limited to what I actually wanted to do with my themes.
Recently in my University education I have been developing my style of painting faces in a hyper-realistic style of working which creates a heightened look at something which could possibly appear to be photographic at distance.
My passion in Photo-realism has increased since looking at Chuck Close’s giant heads originally, and his abstract colour gridded works also. The connection between the two styles I felt was great, seeing how photo-realism was a distancing act from the subject matter and the art itself.
Looking also at non-figurative photo-realists like Richard Estes, Tom Blackwell and Charles Bell, they all relate in the same way of a scanned equally detailed crop of unchanged realism.
I have explored looking at themes like brushing teeth, eating and socially drinking, this to put the character in a situation of relatable circumstance, so again we are as viewers distanced and put in the voyeur perspective of life.
I strive for my work to look like a snapshot and an unthought-out composition, so it looks completely original and 'in the moment'. This because I wish to depict realistically the world around us, not trying to compensate itself or to glamorise itself.
http://www.andrewnewtonart.co.uk/
http://andrewnewtonart.deviantart.com/
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