SELECTED ARTWORKS AND PROJECT STATEMENT

Please click on any image for a more complete representation, plus materials and dimensions. Scroll down the page to see the artist's project statement.

Dizzy Gillespie - full image CLICK TO ENLARGE	Dizzy Gillespie - detail CLICK TO ENLARGE
Sonny Rollins - full image CLICK TO ENLARGE	Sonny Rollins - detail CLICK TO ENLARGE
Duke Ellington - full image CLICK TO ENLARGE	Duke Ellington - detail CLICK TO ENLARGE
Miles Davis - detail CLICK TO ENLARGE	Miles Davis - full image CLICK TO ENLARGE
Miles Davis - full image CLICK TO ENLARGE	Louis Armstrong - full image CLICK TO ENLARGE

The Jazz Masters is a series of works based upon black American jazz musicians.

I wanted to explore the history of this music genre, jazz being one of those daunting subjects where it is impossible to know where to start, and this project gave me the excuse to make the attempt. I also found that the imagery of twentieth century jazz had an immediate visual appeal. It has a very distinct iconography, lying somewhere between the baroque and art nouveau.

Something of which I became aware whilst creating these paintings was the early public recognition that black jazz musicians received, helping to spearhead greater racial equality within the West. At a time when there was still such blatant institutionalized racism towards the black population of America, musicians such as Duke Ellington and Miles Davis were heralded as cultural and intellectual icons. This led me to decide to maintain a solely black identity within the subject matter of this series.

The visual language employed in creating the resultant artworks also pays homage to the diverse iconography of my own artistic heroes such as Klimpt, Munch, Van Goth and Caravaggio, whilst maintaining a loyalty to the subject’s identity and developing my own interest in pattern, colour and light effects.