D P IRWIN

By combining a cultivated response to the portrayal of the human figure throughout art history with a vibrancy of colour, quality of mark making and confidence of draughtsmanship, I aim to convey my commitment to the language of painting as relevant and progressive. 

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My artworks are a move to explore our collective relationship with love, history, sex and politics - interweaving personal experience with broader contemplation on issues of our present moment. Suggestive rather than direct, my paintings are poetical narratives, with subject matter and approach granted equal weight.

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Whilst varied, my methods connect visually and thematically; tensions between intelligence and sensation, realism and abstraction, stasis and motion echo across the work. Drawing inspiration from a wide variety of sources, I combine a propensity toward frequent shifts between scale, media and styles with a strong emphasis on craft. Colour, gesture and material are pitted against one another in unexpected ways. Elaborate layering of visuals, symbolic forms and skewed cultural references produces a complexity of representation at once markedly different and strangely familiar.