I am a figurative oil painter whose practice is shaped by over two decades working as a digital retoucher in the photographic industry. My background in constructing and manipulating images naturally evolved into working with AI text-to-image generation – a technology that extends the possibilities of image-making in ways I find conceptually intriguing.

Since early 2023, I’ve used AI-generated imagery as reference material for my paintings, creating fictitious people and environments. The subjects within these works are not based on particular individuals but are extrapolated from the datasets used to train the AI. In this way, the paintings serve as a source of knowledge production, revealing how AI technologies: reinforce biases, replicate visual conventions, disclose gaps in knowledge and open up new planes of awareness.

What I find most compelling about working with AI is its ability to mimic photography. Historically, photographs signalled that a subject had existed in reality, however briefly. That relationship has fundamentally shifted. The AI images I work from appear photographic, yet they depict entirely fictitious worlds. By translating them into oil paintings, I create hybrid objects that emerge from layered translations: from the AI data, its digital ‘photographic’ output, and finally into a physical painted object. These paintings are temporally complex, and although the people that feature in the paintings are not based on particular individuals, I like to contemplate that they may or may not have existed, or might yet in the future. 

The subject matter of the work is inspired by everyday observations and reflections. Through the depiction of daily activities it becomes possible to find the slippages that exist between our familiar reality and that depicted by the AI. I want the paintings to resonate and feel familiar, yet remain somehow unsettling.

To bridge the digital and the painted, my work maintains a deliberate photographic sensibility whilst preserving unmistakable painterly qualities. Visible brushstrokes, varied paint handling and areas of glazing all point to the active decision-making process I employ whilst painting. I believe this visibility of my ‘hand’ is essential – these works are made by a human, not a machine. Even when depicting subjects that never existed, I want the paintings to insist on their own materiality – the evidence of human presence. In this way, they carve out a space where reality reasserts itself through the act of making.