Elliot Killick

Memory: it’s ephemeral, ever fleeting and unreliable nature is the main influence behind my work. I paint from old, found photographs, generally of people, however, not always. I believe that the photograph is an abstract concept: it captures an instant, which can never be taken again, and makes it permanent. However, the camera captures the moment through it’s own eye, and not that of the beholder of the camera. The photograph is, therefore, an abstraction of the original reference and our viewing of it an abstraction further. A painting of the photograph would be one abstraction beyond even that and, thus, my process begins.

I use oil paint and odourless mineral spirits to abstract the image by ways of blurring and erasure, giving the sense of a hazy memory. I aim to convey anamnesis- a recollection, generally of a supposed previous lived experience. Déjà vu, or a feeling of nostalgia for something familiar yet altogether alien. A longing for something/somewhere/sometime/something that we can’t describe.