Relationships Between Realness and Representation
Shane Berkery strikes a beautiful chord in his oil paintings, through a combination of realism and his own impressions of hue and tone. His aim is to become fluent in the visual language of representing the real human experience through paint.
In my paintings I primarily deal with the human figure. I currently have two distinct sources of imagery, one being old family photos from my Japanese side and the other, photos that I have taken myself. Despite the huge generational and geographical gap between the subjects, I am overcome by the sense of congruity in the human experience between the two. I draw on this and seek to create figures that are truly palpable and universally evoke a sense of ‘realness’.
I like to consider my work in terms of the totality of my oeuvre (including future paintings), rather than isolated complete pieces. I take this approach because I am determined to become utterly fluent in visual language and consider it my mission in painting to reach that point. Each piece is a study into the visual mechanisms that allows for that ‘realness’ to be translated into a two-dimensional image; the relationship between the various languages of paint (representation, abstraction, colour, composition and degree of completion) are carefully scrutinised and studied.
From the purely representational figures in my photographic source material, I hope to extract the sensation of presence and distil that into viscerally ‘real’ beings on canvas.
Follow Shane on Instagram here after you spend time gazing at the phenomenal paintings below.
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