Oil on canvas board
2023

Reaching the penultimate week at AAL, I continued my experiments on the materiality of oil paint and charcoal with Snooze on the Metro.

Similar to Beard, this painting shows a figure slumped asleep, rendered in warm grey tones. The figure is set in a simple surrounding which creeps from golden yellow to off-white. Here I began to introduce raw cadmium red into the shadows and skin to create a homogenous lack of distinction within the figure and subtly out towards the surrounding background.

I’ve always had a difficult internal debate over how to resolve the characteristics of the background and the subject, a debate I continue to work on. Here I wanted to obfuscate that distinction, to confuse the separation between figure and surroundings.