Q: Why paint? Painting is dead (especially photorealism).

All the more reason to paint. If I were to think about why I paint, I’d have to take the reader way back, to some cheesy epiphany, or precious memory from my childhood, that you don’t really care to hear of - though you would probably feign interest out of politeness (if this conversation were not occurring in the internet). It is true our motivations for many of the things we do as adults, come from our experiences in our early life, and I cannot discredit the influence my grandmother, an artist, must’ve had on my artistic development. But we won’t go there. Instead let us think of why a painter might continue painting. Why paint when the world has more pressing issues worthy of our devotion, why paint when there is the camera to document and skew - why bother to take the time?

Each of my larger paintings take a ridiculous amount of time to complete. Often over one hundred hours, though I am really not counting. One might think that this would discourage me from taking up realism, but it is actually quite the opposite. The more time I spend, the more I realise what time can do. I realise how limiting the camera can be, and how much can be given back to the image when it becomes painting.

Photography can be a powerful medium, but painting is better.

Or at least it is better for me.

This is because painting gives an immense power and presence to images. The more detail, the more time devoted, the more important the thing painted must be. This is the purpose, to ‘purpose-less painting’. To draw attention, to imbue value. What we choose to give value in our paintings is automatically given political potential. For this reason, painters must keep painting. They must be the ones to search for beauty, to give it value, to pursue goodness in their work - and this is no easy, or unimportant thing. That is not to say an artist must paint only pretty and inoffensive things. No. That is is not what I mean at all. I mean that all work says something, about something, and we should be careful, as painters, of what that is. We must take responsibility for our images, their power to beautify and define.

Of course these are my personal opinions, my thoughts on why I paint, and what painting is to me. Ultimately, painters should paint whatever they want. For me, my interest lay in transforming images into something imposing, in questioning the relationship between beauty and concepts of virtue and spirituality, and exploring the ways in which these things can be communicated in painting.

Enjoy, and paint responsibly.