I began using old family photographs as a base for the colour schemes of my aerial paintings.
The picture above of my mum was taken before I was born so looking at it, it seem familiar but
is a false memory for me as this is an image of my mum before I knew her. I feel nostalgic but
it is a false nostalgia. My printer ran out of ink and began to de-saturate images when it printed
them and I was interested in the contrast; the way it seems the grey is sucking the colour out
the image. I felt it would be an interesting challenge to work with that idea on canvas. And by
using the photo as a basis for the colour scheme, in a sense, I was secretly coding the false
memory of my mum into the work.
www.michaelpybus.co.uk
The collage pieces allow me to work with many types of media and formats. They are the
basis of my thinking along with my drawings, they are my thought in their purest form. The
ideas in these, I try to keep as raw as possible, and get the image out my head and straight
onto paper. I imagine these works are the images you would see in my cities; on billboards,
fly-posters, adverts.
The unit paintings are a series of works depicting 1960/70s modernist housing. Its
strong geometric design was a great draw for me, again, allowing me to explore
geometric composition but in an abstract and non-abstract sense (it's a house but it's
also a collection of squares and rectangles). I imagine these houses lay in the suburbs
of my larger more abstract aerial views of cityscapes. Again they are also abandoned as
the housings stand dilapidated.
Jake Gyllenhall (and Scarlett Johansson) are of interest to me due to their new found status of being big celebrities. They seem to me to directly
embody now (or an example of now) as opposed to the photos of my mum which were about the past. People look up to actors like Gyllenhaal
and Johansson wishing they looked like them, had theIr fame, opportunities. Their status is at a peak and can now go down or up. The title
'Various Peaks' is threefold; it literally means the various peaks of the mountain range, the various peaks of Gyllenhaal's career and it's also about
my own thinking and anxieties of my career as a solo artist.
Acrylic on canvas 162.5 x 162.5
Basically what I am trying to achieve is to create an entire world; the cities, the buildings, the imagery
which you would see if you entered these cities. The design of the painting is inspired from the
memories of the old computer games I played as a child. The bold, flat geometric styling allowed me to
explore formal shape and colour relation issues, as well as simultaneously developing my own
sprawling abandoned cityscape.