Interview with Justin Mortimer

It’s completely instinctual. It’s painting by the seat of your pants. As we have talked about in the studio, maybe not now. When I’m composing ideas for pictures I roughly sketch them out on the computer. I scan images, I collect all the data that I have on my hard drive, image databases, from scans of cats, to wedding cakes, limbs, background photographs that I’ve taken on holiday. Through the process of using the computer you can come out with a very realized image very quickly making it a very seductive process. But it’s up to me to translate that to a piece of work from that digital image. I certainly become very seduced by the sort of pseudo realities that can be made in Photoshop. So when I start painting I very quickly see holes and problems in the image and also how banal that image is. It’s up to me to bring something in with the use of paint. As I make the image, the painting starts to dictate the image so I move away from the initial source that I made on the computer. In fact, I often make the image on the computer, begin the painting, see the problems or the good things, and go back to the computer to redraft that image, scale it up, and reimpose that onto the image again. So my pictures are quite fragmented looking because it’s often a combination of six different images all part of the same thing. I’m constantly looking for those serendipitous clashes with the first layer doing something interesting with the top layer. It dictates itself, it has its own volition, which is a completely different process from when you are working on the computer.

- Taken from an interview with Justin Mortimer on ArtSlant.