Painted Photographs
In 2023 Daniel & Clara began working on painted photographs, a new strand of their practice in which photography and painting collide as they print digital photographs in black & white using a traditional chemical process then hand-paint them with acrylics.
This journey from digital to analogue photography, then to painting, mirrors the artist's desire to spend more time with direct forms of making, to 'get hands on', something they have described as increasingly needed in a screen-based world.
This journey from digital to analogue photography, then to painting, mirrors the artist's desire to spend more time with direct forms of making, to 'get hands on', something they have described as increasingly needed in a screen-based world.
The past in the present and the present as the future past (Avebury Stones), 2024
Since first visiting Avebury stone circle in 2017, Daniel & Clara's practice has focused on place, landscape and nature as a subject. In their ongoing body of work about this ancient neolithic site, they explore the human need to make sense of their place in the universe through making art and telling stories.
Using photographs taken on their first visit to the stone circle, they stain and pour fluid colour over the black & white pictures, transforming them into unique artefacts, each capturing multiple moments of time.
There is the moment the photos were taken, as the artist stood before the great sarsen monoliths, and the time seven years later when they applied colour paint to the images. Then there are the timescales of the stones themselves, as they stand now, five thousand years after neolithic people erected them in the Wiltshire landscape, and, of course, the vast unthinkable eons of geological time in which these stones were formed in the earth.
“Our Avebury work is often a way of thinking about the past and how we humans make sense of our place in the world and in the universe. It's about that impulse to mark our presence in some way, by raising a stone circle, taking a photograph or making marks in paint. All these actions express our need to say 'I exist, I was here'.”
- Daniel & Clara
The past in the present and the present as the future past (Avebury Stone #1)
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
The past in the present and the present as the future past (Avebury Stone #2)
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
The past in the present and the present as the future past (Avebury Stone #3)
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
The past in the present and the present as the future past (Avebury Stone #4)
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
2024, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, 45.7 x 30.5 cm
£500 + shipping
To purchase a picture please get in touch via the button below.
“Throughout their body of Avebury work, [Daniel & Clara] explore the textures of
emotions and dreams, of fears and visions, and ask what happens as these
human experiences rub up against the megaliths and the ancient sacred
landscape.”
- Susan Owens, ‘Avebury’, Daniel & Clara Landscape Imaginary (2022)
Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside, 2023
A series of hand-painted photographs of dead animals encountered during Daniel & Clara's daily walks in the countryside. Each work is a uniquely painted c-type photograph with the name of the species along with place and date found inscribed in white india ink.
“Since we moved to the countryside in 2020, we often encounter dead animals during our daily walks, sometimes roadkill, sometimes the remains of another animal’s meal, and sometimes the body in an apparently pristine condition, the cause of death a mystery. We always feel a strange combination of repulsion and a desire to look. We found ourselves compulsively taking photographs each time we'd see a dead animal but it took us a while to know what we would do with these pictures. Painting became a way to have a deeper engagement with the subject and to bring into the photograph (a mechanical record of death) a vitality of life while lived (the marks of our conscious living engagement, and our empathetic leap into the dead animal’s experience).”
- Daniel & Clara
Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside (Garganey, West Mersea Beach, 7/01/2023) #1
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside (Garganey, West Mersea Beach, 7/01/2023) #2
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside (Garganey, West Mersea Beach, 7/01/2023) #4
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside (Garganey, West Mersea Beach, 7/01/2023) #4
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
2023, c-type photograph hand-painted in acrylic, titled and signed in white india ink, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
£500 + shipping
To purchase a picture please get in touch via the button below.
“We've been thinking a lot about historical depictions of dead animals, particularly still lives from the 18th/19th century. The animals depicted were hunted or farmed for food and presented as demonstrations of abundance and wealth. Our pictures differ in that these animals are wild and found dead in the landscape, photographed as we found them. These are still lives born at the other end of the industrial revolution and under the atmosphere of the climate crisis – they are personal meditations on the lives and deaths of the animals that live unseen around us.”
- Daniel & Clara