Art Auction - Arms Around the Child

Colin was born in Belfast in 1977 and studied at Central St.Martins College of Art in London, where he still lives and works. After being awarded the Royal Ulster Academy student prize he has shown at art fairs and exhibitions in Glasgow, New York, Miami, London and has had solo shows in Dublin and Belfast.

The artist paint stereotypes rather than individuals, meshing references from the photographic storyboards of romantic comics and their heightened sense of melodrama, with the more sinister undertones of American film noir and pulp crime novels. The subjects are superficially attractive but there is an underlying sense of their narcissism and perhaps even their engagement in acts which the viewer is compelled to interpret as illicit. As a result, the viewer is cast as a voyeur, the perception of what’s taking place in the paintings suspended in a double take, in an ambivalence between observation and accusation.

Colin usually works on panels of wood veneer, framed in linen – a reversal of the traditional materials used. His art heroes are John Currin, Chuck Close and Charles Burns.