Geraldine SWAYNE

I am (mostly) a figurative painter. My subjects aren’t deliberately sensationalist, but my work has a filmic atmosphere and dreamlike quality, with uneasy undertones. I work largely from photographs rather than life, and process the image into something else, choosing subjects drawn both from my circle of friends and anonymous sources. The bodies and faces of my paintings possess an interior psychological narrative, which I try to amplify with painterly effects that speak to the nervous system rather than to intellect, for example, they can seem restrained, rather than dramatically active, but hopefully this serves to heighten evidence of a vivid, if sometimes unusual, interior psyche. I paint with enamels because of the luminous quality of its colour and because of its viscosity, which suits my speed of application.