Ed Saye
“I make landscapes out of what I feel.” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
My paintings are full of middle-aged men like me, avatars sort of, playing golf, watering lawns, smoking, floating, lying down. They're sometimes pensive, sometimes radiant, sometimes both. There’s not much happening, except maybe the low-key drama of just being. The figures move through surreal, almost psychedelic landscapes at dusk, rendered in saturated colours and acid greens, with the faint apocalyptic hum of too much light on a summer evening. It's as if a Renaissance altarpiece got lost inside a retro video game.
There’s meant to be lightness here, but also dread. The men in my paintings seem adrift, gently performing their leisure. Golf clubs become wands or weapons, depending on the angle. Lawns stretch out like strange stages. It's masculinity, maybe, but in a costume - performative, nostalgic, unsure. These worlds aren’t utopias, but they’re not exactly dystopias either. They’re invented landscapes of feeling. As Fernando Pessoa put it, “I make landscapes out of what I feel,” and that feels right. I’m painting fantasy in order to understand reality.
My process is hybrid: I use oil paint, yes, but also digital drawing and image-making tools in the initial stages. I grew up alongside the birth of computer games but also exposed to painting and art. I loved the latter more than the former. Now I watch my children playing computer games; these are the tools and images around me, and I want to see what happens when old and new mediums merge to create a new language. The result, I hope, is a kind of digital-physical fiction. Something that’s not quite real but is trying to feel its way toward truth.
At heart, I think I’m painting in defence of the everyday. And in defence of painting itself—a medium slow enough to hold conflicting things together: melancholy and joy, banality and wonder, digital noise and painterly touch.
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