Acrylic mesh paintings in corporate and private collections
William Morris inspired painting of the old grocery shop opposite my home, and a tribute to June who worked in the shop all her life serving the local public.
Private Collection, D Jones and J Morris, Directors of the Business Design Centre, Islington, London ‘Fresh Art’.
I've been making physical mesh paintings for several years; a process like screen printing, that came from playful attempts to manually replicate the offset lithography printing process used to print billboard posters (before they all went digital).
I push acrylic paint through perforated aluminium mesh, dry the paint, remove/poke out parts of the dry paint and then repeat by pushing a new colour layer of paint through the exposed holes, until I have a desired image. I work from behind and I don’t see the image until after the paint has been pushed through the holes. I use paper templates to help guide the image, which is mostly representational imagery. The process restricts expressive or gestural movements, it’s a mechanical process. I enjoy the challenge and constraints of the process and the tension between mechanical and human, handmade.
Over the past year I have been exploring ‘digital twin’ versions of my mesh painting technique, exploring various digital processes from virtual reality, animation to GANs. See digital twin experimentation on the Process page and the NFT Collections.
Butlins family portrait, painting from a photograph taken in 1977.
Exhibited at the National Maritime Museum alongside Lowry’s Man in a Bowler Hat. Part of the re:INVENTING exhibition, 22nd May – 28th July 2006.
Inspired by the particular sense of isolation and emptiness in Lowry’s Man in a Bowler Hat and the simplicity of his Glasgow Docks paintings. The Boat image is copied from a photograph of a small boat taken in passing from the top deck of a channel ferry. The raised viewpoint on a passing scene is reminiscent of Lowry’s paintings. The Boat painting shows an isolated boat, its location unidentified by land or sea, its figures defined only by a few dots of colour, and the viewer looks down on the toy-like scene.
Abandoned home of Wimbledon FC, Plough Lane, before demolition. The painting of an empty defunct football terrace was inspired by my interest in places, objects and things that have come to the end of their lives.
Exhibited at Cork Street, London, in the Dangerous Corners exhibition. Collection of The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), Manchester.
This painting was inspired by a piece of documentary footage at a Malcolm Morley exhibition at The Hayward Gallery. In the film Morley was painting outside; he had an easel and stool and was busy painting a picture of a tiger. For a moment I thought he may be painting direct from life, but as the camera pans out you see he’s actually painting an advertisement of a tiger, displayed on the side of a coach parked in a safari car park.
On leaving the exhibition I picked up an exhibition poster and transcribed a section of this picture. I aimed to question my relationship to the picture and its relationship to me; in a way I claimed the image for myself, so a viewer who is not familiar with the original picture or its context will judge it within the context of my practice and not its original context. Unintentionally the man in the picture has a slight resemblance to myself, so the painting could easily be mistaken for one of my own holiday snaps (this has happened). More interestingly, those who are familiar with the original are likely to dismiss my work as a cheap imitation.
Exhibited in the DRAWN BEYOND exhibition, 23 April – 11 May 2018.
This 12ft by 6ft painting was created for a retrospective exhibition of my father Dave Follows’ life work as a cartoonist. The painting was created using fragments of cartoons, montaged together from different cartoons to make an empty panoramic living room view. The empty room signifies the loss of my father and the characters he drew who inhabited this cartoon room for over 25 years.
Two world maps with bags of extracted paint.
Acrylic on perforated office ceiling tile.
Hospital chair, aerosol paint on canvas.
Open painting created over an open studios weekend at Stockwell Studios. Visitors were invited to contribute throughout the weekend.
About
UK-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, sculpture, site-specific installation and video. His work centres on painting, evolving through deep experimentation with materials, processes and technology.
Co-founder of artsXR, an immersive production studio, and Emerging Technologies Lead at University of the Arts London (UAL), exploring the integration of new technologies into arts practice, including design, performance and art.
Chris established the Digital Maker Collective (DMC) in 2016 and was invited to be a Tate Exchange associate in 2017, curating several large-scale creative tech events over four years at Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
His mesh paintings are held in corporate and private collections, and his digital mesh paintings can be found in web3 collections across multiple blockchains.