Dan Coombs, 'Unfolding Man' 2019
"The compositions of my paintings are developed through collage studies that I use to paint from. The figures are distorted or straight photocopies that I place, move and paint around on a smaller canvas. Collage enables me to hold the form of each figure, but to move them in relation to each other within a field space. It also brings in an element that exists outside of myself, that is found rather than invented. I can’t imagine not having a relation to photography or the empirical. Though I invent environments and relationships around the figures, and the paintings intentionally blur the relation of the real and the imaginary, there has to be a tension. It seems impossible for me to work entirely from the imagination.
The figures are painted from photographs that are distorted by vibrating and shaking the image of the nude on a photocopier. I have to make hundreds, and from those choose ones to paint from. This random process generates figures that are both grotesque and beautiful, alien and familiar."
Dan Coombs
