'JC' acrylic on canvas, 60x60cm.

Jamie Christ is a close friend, hugely talented tattoo artist, exuberant, explosive performer and the subject of this painting. Jamie and I share a love of religious references and subversion. The overlap was impossible to resist. I love painting men. I think the female gaze is still not represented to its fullest extent and I like to explore the male body from a particularly personal point of view, as the object of affection/desire/fascination/longing. The pose is deliberately theatrical, echoing the beautifully exaggerated religious scenes I grew up looking at. I think we all have an internal visual language, a set of codes learned from our history and surroundings that help us decipher what we are supposed to feel about subjects posed in this way. There is reverence here but perhaps reverence for a different version of man than we are used to. The background is a slightly sugary version of the background of one of my favourite early renaissance paintings. The double image and layering is a nod to the flickering idealism of this memory- it's a perfect, unreal