Artist StatementI am a social realist painter.
My ongoing body of work looks at our relationship with personal technology. My aim is to capture the zeitgeist through urban landscapes and contemporary portraiture. It is a social documentary on our digital epoch and the status of the human being within society. I started these series in 2015 to reflect the increasingly addictive relationship we have with the tech that dominates our lives. Seeing people connected to their devices 24/7 is so common that we don’t give it a second thought anymore. As the American writer, Henry Miller, puts it “What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually, he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to.” I like my paintings to feel technically beautiful. There is an intentional dichotomy between my technology-centric images and my traditional painting process. Through the materiality of the canvas’s surface and my fine mark making, I believe my paintings inherently point back to me as their author. Personal technology is blurring our physical and digital worlds and making us fundamentally rethink what it means to be human. My paintings hold a mirror up to what we have become and give us clues to what might lie ahead. |
© Peter Davis 2023 | Member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts |