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.

Widescreen Version

Today the opposite of tomato is 'Code: Selfish'

Finally, an update of recent painting practice, this example being the latest in the series of still life studies of a selection of the sawn cylinders of silver birch, (re)presented as a panorama suggesting a woodland space rather than the domestic arrangement it in fact is.

The physical support is a length of shelf from a deconstructed unit (which thus has a relationship to the similar horizontal plane on which the objects are composed and actively observed), over which canvas has been stretched.

As is habitual, the application of the paint is intended to make of the painting an object and foreground itself as handmade material fact as it represents other objects in space.

'Silver Birch Still Life #4'

oil on canvas on board/15.5 x 78cm/January 2019

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