Quite quickly, a pattern started to emerge from the images we were taking. I was favouring those that implied perspective. The wide-angle lens captured walls, paving, and other man-made objects as large plains. I liked seeing the figure within them as inert; in some way utterly oblivious to the impact of the environment. The unusual poses of the body contradicted the context of each photograph.

I began to experiment with these images digitally and sketched on some of the printed results. A pattern emerged in which I was obscuring the body and accentuating poses where the face was turned away from the viewer.

Better still, I liked the images where the implied perspective contradicted the pose. This is rare in nature. I became interested in the possibility of negative perspective. It would be one thing to come up with an image that showed this, but another to let the harmony of a good composition shine through.

Around this time, I started something new. A former tutor had explained to me that when she paints monochromatically, she always mixes her own greys. Rather than simply mixing black and white in different quantities, she would mix browns and blues, ochres and greens, until she had a subtle palette of rich greys to play with. I adopted this technique and fell in love with it. I decided that the next paintings would be monochromatic.

Lacking a life-model, I used photographs of myself to capture an image of a torso with stark, strong shadows. standing side on in a hallway and lit from the side, I selected a few images to work with.

From then on, it was a process of messing with the images and finally bringing the brush to the canvas. thin washes of greys built from light to dark to create the painted result.

As the series progressed, each painting became slightly more worked and progressive from the last. The fact that I cannot completely describe their purpose tells me that the series isn't over yet. I am not moving on to something utterly different thematically while there is still more to explore. In some of the later works, I have been adding more textured substances - continuing to throw veils over the image and suggest, at its root, the photographic origins of each painting. Playing within these boundaries is also encouraging me to develop a more classical form of painting. The latest in the Negate series features three small still-life objects in a kind of side-show to the constrained torso, each of which is rendered in a more precise form than anything I have produced in oil.

Aside from the personal work, exposure to Bacon's paintings have surely influenced the Negate series - in particular, Study from the Human Body.

Bacon took this image of a torso, also with the face obscured, and proceeded to veil the form with these washes of grey. They create a curtain of paint that the figure appears to be moving through. The surface is unevenly coated, with plenty of untouched canvas showing through, giving it a flat quality. Still, the bottom left of the image shows an implied perspective - a context for the figure.

Painting from life may be the academically accepted norm when depicting the human body but its good to see great work arising from someone who took photography as their point of departure.

Study from the Human Body
1949 - oil on canvas
Francis Bacon