AFTER WHISTLEJACKET

2019
Oil and wax on linen
in two parts, each: 292 x 148 cm

AFTER THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA

FURTHER WRITINGS ON THE WORK

After The Raft of the Medusa
Oil and wax on linen
500 x 700 cm (consisting 24 equal sized panels)
Began in February 2015 completed February 2016

AFTER LAS MENINAS

'After Las Meninas' 2011 is Beard's reinterpretation of Diego Velazquez's iconic 'Las Meninas' 1656. He regularly encountered 'Las Meninas' 1656 at the Museo del Prado during a two year spell in Madrid, Spain. It is a famously complex image renowned for complicating our process of recognition by confusing what appears real and illusory in paint.

Beard has taken this one step further in replicating the dimensions and composition of the original, but creating a distinctive picture that is at once indistinguishable yet strangely familiar. The linen has been characteristically layered over and over with scumbled screens of black oil and wax so that the image is almost hidden. These thin layers are built up so that the forms appear as a variation in the texture of the surface. We move in relation to the painting and the direction of the light, so that the image has the effect of coming into focus and then receding.

This viewing experience divorces the image from its weighty history all the while returning the object to materiality and presence. New meaning is created through the slippage between understanding and sensation. - WAYNE TUNICLIFFE