TOM GILLAN

Drawing is the basis of all my work, whether painting, printmaking or computer-generated and records the interplay between observation and representation, the conscious and the unconscious.
Selected Works 2007-2008, Meld Gallery, May 2008
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The images in my colour print series are not famous works, but lie within the mainstream of both Western and Eastern painting and sculpture traditions.
“In Petrus 01, Angel 01, Navonna 01 & 02 I have used photographs taken by a friend of Renaissance statuary in Rome and combined them with scans of wallpaper patterns. Solid stone is thus juxtaposed with ephemeral time-faded paper, the flimsiest of materials.
Young Girl and Young Man are images from 16th century Flemish portraiture combined with Persian carpet designs, giving the impression of solidity and fragility. What appears to be fixed and solid has an underlying filigree structure of energetic relationships.
In Dying Captive I have taken a work by Michelangelo and combined it with Islamic tapestry patterns. Angel 02 is a photograph taken in a local graveyard combined with Chinese wallpaper design. In The Garden, Morning Glory and Fragrance I have combined androgynous figures from late 19th century French realism with Chinese wallpaper and French Jacquard design. The paintings, revolutionary in their day for their photographic likeness, were superseded and forgotten with the advent of Impressionism. Often dismissed as saccharin-sweet chocolate box images, they yet resonate with the power of the eternal Feminine principle. The androgynous figures suggest for me a Jungian reconciliation of opposites. In Stellar I have taken a 19th century American photographic portrait and combined it with an image from the Hubble Space Telescope, suggesting a tension between our fleeting humanity with the often-ignored yet vast forces at work in the universe.”
My Sepia-tone prints started as sketchpad drawings. The imagery is taken from dreams and daydreams, 19th and 20th century photographs and Italian Renaissance art. The interpretation or narrative is left up to the viewer.
The works have been tonally posterized and colour-saturated using digital image-enhancement software. They are printed by industry professionals who specialize in printing works of fine art, using non-fugitive Canon inks on acid-free Canson Mi-Tientes paper, and framed according to archivally sensitive standards.