Georgia Glass

 I am an incessant people watcher, fascinated by the stranger. Essentially I want to paint every person that ever lived. It is the ability of a painting-like connection, avoiding the illusion of understanding between the subject and myself, that allows the probability of misinterpretation to be openly admitted. My works depict awkward poses, charismatic expressions and an anachronistic nervousness that’s due to the unknown characters being selected from found photographs.

I think of painting as being like a posted letter, in our fast paced world it is time demanding and intimate, so within my practice there is an underlying slowness and subservience to time. The titles are all idioms. The sayings intended meanings do not relate literally to the paintings, it is the lack of clarity the idiom provides that emphasises the miscommunications going on both in the work itself, and then again in the minds of the viewers. The apparent nonsense of the written word attempting to explain a discordant visual highlights both the function of portraiture and also our interactions as strangers; how we share in each other’s romances, arguments and dull everyday events, simply through visual observation and misinterpretation; devoid of real comprehension or reality. By bringing dull, odd, awkward, obsolete moments to the forefront and cementing them in little paintings, a subject’s quirks cannot be so easily ignored. Within my shy but intimate depictions of unknown characters the gesture holds all the clues yet reality has long since been lost, all that’s left is in riddles.