Consequence (Details). Work in progress.
Oil on canvas, triptych
Exploring the places where emotion lives in the body.
Artist Fields is embracing a new chapter as a figurative artist, painting from personal experience of a cult upbringing and the consequences of trauma. While immersed in a developing, researching and sketching phase, revealed on this page is a preview of the first under-paintings of a triptych that will become part of Fields' first body of work.
His paintings use the figure as a vessel for vulnerability, grief, intimacy, memory, longing and the ways we carry experience with us. Rather than illustrating a particular story, he is interested in creating images that feel instinctive and open, where meaning can be sensed before it is understood.
Fields draws on the history of figurative painting while looking for a language that feels immediate and personal. The body becomes both subject and landscape: stretched, folded, obscured, fragmented or held together through gesture. Faces may disappear, forms may dissolve, and figures overlap or emerge from one another, allowing emotion to exist beyond facial expression or narrative. His paintings move between tenderness and unease. Softness sits alongside distortion; intimacy alongside distance.
At the centre of the work is a belief in painting as a space for honesty. Fields is interested in what happens when the figure is allowed to become less specific and more universal: no longer a portrait of one person, but a place for the viewer to recognise something of their own experience.
The paintings are ultimately about connection — between bodies, between memory and the present, and between what can be expressed and what remains beyond language.
Consequence. Work in progress.
Oil on canvas, triptych
35 x 64 in, 70 x 78 in, 35 x 64 in.