The Art of ‘Quick and Easy Haircutting’

Creative inspiration can strike from anywhere at any time and the following pair of examples of recent painting illustrate that very point.

I’m a keen fan of Instagram for both promotion and research, enjoying the exchange, the give-and-take, of creative endeavour that it facilitates in what I consider to be user-friendly style. One of the accounts I follow, with keen anticipation, features regular postings of vintage products in their original packaging and one such update provided irresistible grist to the mill. I must confess a particular nostalgia for the things and imagery of the time of my own childhood in the 1960s and 70s, and packaging and advertising are evocative and fertile source material indeed. I should also confess that despite the attraction of this image, I was most averse to having my hair cut until well into my teens, so there's no way I would have ever been pictured beaming, as the depicted young chap is, in the presence of any such implements.

There was just something so insistent about the image illustrating a box of ‘Pifco’ electric home hair clippers that it demanded representation, with certain artistic licence taken in the process of.

'untitled (Pifco) #1'

oil on canvas/16 x 20"/December 2018 - January 2019

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Subsequent research produced evidence of a related product, or another temporally similar version of, either a predecessor or successor, with its associated packaging imagery providing the perfect complement to the original, a parental coupling attending to the tonsorial maintenance of their offspring with tender regard.

Interpretation as to meaning is left entirely to the spectator.

'untitled (Pifco) #2'

oil on canvas/16 x 20"/January 2019

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To conclude, the paintings presented as a diptych.