Paul Lemmon - sold work

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Paul is a self-taught painter who studied graphic design and worked as a designer before committing to painting full-time. He works from his own photography acquired whilst soaking up the culture and colour of city life, and considers this to be an integral part of his practice. Once the images and compositions have been established, Paul works with the oil paint very rapidly in order to preserve and intensify the spontaneity inherent in the original image – seeking to heighten the energy and emotion of the captured moment through vigorous brushwork, vivid colour and strong contrast. His work is characterised by sharp, unorthodox angles and ruthless cropping which result in paintings that are laced with a seductive cinematic urgency.

Paul’s subject matter and approach are inspired by the work of photographer William Eggleston with his ‘snap-shot aesthetic’, and by nineteenth century French writer Charles Baudelaire and his descriptions of excursions through the Parisian bars and streets of his time. This approach leaves a distinctively voyeuristic impression on Paul’s work, reflecting contemporary obsessions with the hidden camera and fly-on-the-wall observation. Also, by omitting the specifics of environment and identity through the heavy crop and graphic composition, Paul aims to engage the viewer in an even more intimate but open-ended way: ‘… what interests me most,’ he asserts, ‘is conveying atmosphere and mood rather than individual people or locations. I want the viewer to feel immersed in my paintings, to feel a sense of physical presence and to be left to imagine their own characters and narratives in what they’re seeing.’

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