Description

This unmade bed painting was gently stroked into existence over the course of a month. Letting each thin layer of paint dry, as I slowly built it up – meticulously describing every crease.

At a certain time each morning the sun floods into my bedroom. I took a bunch of photos, trying to capture the feeling that my unmade bed gives me. The first few photos were flat and uninviting, looking down upon my bed. However, once I levelled the lens with the mattress and ignored the pillows, the quilt became like a mountainscape and a whole photo series emerged. I want to paint some more of these unmade bed scenes but they take a lot of patience.

I didn’t want to have a grey painting made from just black and white paint, so I searched for the colours in amongst all the white.

My bed is a place I adore but to share it’s dishevelled intimacy takes courage. I now respect how brave Tracy Emin is to put her unmade bed on exhibition.

“There must be other painters who have reached the same conclusion about their unmade beds” I thought to myself. I used the search term, “oil painting unmade bed” on a Google image search. I found Stephanie Serpick’s photorealistic oil paintings of empty beds. Her work struck me – she’d done it so well. I kept looking at her work over a few days and though at first it felt similar to what I wanted to achieve, on a closer inspection her work is smaller, coming from a place of grief and is very much a portrait of the bed. I still wanted to paint my version.

My painting is about the surrender to love, sex, sleep, dreams, bliss and gaining consciousness each morning. It’s also about the orifice and the landscape.

At close range the creases in the unmade bed linen appear to be made from a crescendo of sensual, colourful scribbles that when viewed from afar, transform into a dramatic mountainous scene.

Previously, I’ve done my best to avoid painting realistic swathes of fabric because it does take immense concentration.