“My work presents a twilit, chimerical world haunted by figures, animals and hybrids.
I am preoccupied with how humans leave a trace of their presence both as individuals and collectively on the world; the way a figure can electrify a room, the trajectory of a firework across the sky.
My paintings capture the visceral presence of the human figure; light falling on flesh; or bodies coalescing with their surroundings. However they are also concerned with more metaphysical and sometimes violent collisions between humans and the natural world. Figures transform into birds; a vortex of shipwrecked bodies and jellyfish intermingle.
I am fascinated by how marks on a surface can at once create and destroy and how those same marks can fetishise both the medium of paint and the subject I am painting equally. Some of my works are painted on newspaper and I enjoy and seek to exploit the way the newsprint interrupts the painted surface with a kind of soft violence.
Ultimately, my paintings explore both the desire and the disquietude in the human experience through my own experience as a queer man living and working both in the heart of the city and more recently in rural isolation”. – James Dearlove.
Contrast is the overarching factor in all that I do in my practice. It manifests in subject matter as well as technique. Through painting I analyze how things relate to one another; ideas and concepts in my head brushstrokes/visual elements in a painting.
Painting for me always came from a place of inner conflict. As a child I could never really relate to my peers. Like there was a code of conduct that was the norm to everybody but I didn’t get the memo. I felt rejected for being sensitive, this contributed to my desire to be physically imposing to compensate for my softness on the inside. This muscle-suit that I’m wearing feels like a role, almost like reverse drag. I try to observe from in as well as outside of this suit.
I see the bodybuilding lifestyle that I live as an undocumented performance that informs my painting practice. I am my own muse and try to confirm as well as challenge hyper-masculine traits and features.
A lot of my inspiration comes from classical painting, and sculpture. These influences are integrated into my visual language where they form relationships with earlier collected imagery, all with their own symbolic significance.
Horses function as the perfect vehicles in my work for a multitude of stories and or emotions. To me they are the perfect balance between hard and soft, masculine and feminine.
Angels, rarely in flight with wings that appear almost too heavy and large to fly with. Or is it the weight of their huge muscles that keeps them on the ground? The pressure of conforming to a traditional image of masculinity? They however also exuberate strength, like a warrior downed in battle.
The topics that I cover in my work have been a part of art and culture for so long they might be considered clichés. I do not avoid them though. This cliché treatment of images is a strategy to research my own insecurities. By externalizing my inner conflicts I make them visible and try to find logic behind it”. –Bas Schippers
