Jon Doran

"I am interested in taking classical subjects of still life, portraiture and figures in landscape and rearticulating them through a digitally influenced and fragmented approach to painting.

Maurice Denis spoke of 'before a painting is a war horse, or a nude, it is first simply an arrangement of colour, lines and shapes.' This duality is fascinating and I want to try to exploit it in my work. Hopefully viewers find themselves bouncing between engaging with the subject, the cup or floral arrangement for example, and the actual substance of paint, the streaks, dashes and marks. Almost like breaking the forth wall, I hope to coax the eye into believing the play of light on form, but then call it out and show that it's just paint on a surface.

I tend to paint different subjects in the search for emotionally charged atmospheres. Figures in woodlands, inspired by Caspar David Friedrich's 'Wanderers' are a constant. The groups of people tend to be navigating and working there way through dense shrubbery, which I find to be both visually interesting as well as philosophically pertinent. Also cups and flowers, an influence by the likes of Cezanne and Mondrian. These are an attempt to find profundity in the simple. The Portraits, well, what can I say other than painting peoples faces is totally fascinating.

I am interested in what it means to be a painter in the 21st century. What does cutting edge representational painting look like? I want to make work that harnesses traditional processes of the past, as well as utilizing the technologies of the modern day, to create both visually interesting and conceptually charged paintings. Hopefully my work isn’t just a mere example of mirror of current zeitgeists that will soon past, but rather it attempts to engage with deeper more fundamental and universal themes, of beauty, meaning and purpose."