Dedicated to all those who, when they were young, were told they could be whatever they wanted, so grew up to be dreamers.
The Wedding Portrait
Oil on Canvas
76 x 123cm
2025
In an age awash with images, curated, filtered, fleeting, oil portraiture definitely slows time. Unlike the shutter of a phone, the painted portrait demands duration, both from the artist and the viewer. It speaks in the language of stillness, of time distilled. And this is its radical modern necessity: it resists disappearance.
This luminous, theatrical jewel of a painting — The Wedding Portrait. It hums with devotion, not only in their pose, but from the hand that painted them, as though every stroke were a vow.
The artist and his new wife stand in a cloistered world of pink. The colour is no accident: it is both ceremonial and surreal, the shade of blooming and blush, the tone of skin and softness. This is not realism. This is reverence.
Their forms emerge not in a literal setting but against a backdrop of deep ultramarine, like the night sky behind a stage. The arched void behind them recalls sacred niches, Renaissance altarpieces, and conjures a space both architectural and symbolic, as if these lovers were saints of something newly minted: tenderness, youth, commitment in a cynical age.
Look at their bodies: they do not simply pose. They lean subtly toward one another, drawn by gravity or love. Their expressions — hers playful, almost wry; his a softened adoration — are not fixed but alive with contradiction. This is not the tidy smile of a photograph. It is more uncertain, more human. And it is in that humanity that the painting triumphs.
This, then, is what portraiture still does in our age: it halts the ephemeral. It declares: this person, this moment, mattered. It offers intimacy without voyeurism. It holds memory in suspension, not as nostalgia, but as testimony.
Self Portrait
Oil on Canvas Board
50 x 40cm
2025
In Arthur Bloye’s Self Portrait, the viewer is met not with grand gestures or mythic transformation, but with the quiet resistance of a body at rest. Reclining on a sapphire velvet sofa in loosely draped pyjamas, the artist gazes blankly into the luminous glow of a laptop, a soft fortress of cushions and throws nestled around him. The room is warmly cluttered, intimate — a basket of yarn, a houseplant, a lamp patterned with foliage. The entire composition hums with domestic stillness. Yet above him looms a striking spectre: The Death of Chatterton (1856), Henry Wallis’s iconic rendering of the youthful Romantic poet, dead by suicide, martyred to poverty and genius. It is no accident that Chatterton’s lifeless body mirrors Bloye’s languid pose — both supine, both alone. But where Wallis’s painting is soaked in tragic chiaroscuro and sanctified struggle, Bloye’s canvas is defiantly, playfully alive. Here lies not a dead boy-poet in a garret, but a living artist at home — not suffering, but idle. This is not parody, but inversion; not an erasure of art’s pain, but a reorientation of its source. Suffering is no longer the price of authenticity. Comfort is not apathy, but autonomy. Bloye’s painterly language is precise and tender, with echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites’ rich textures and symbolic framing. His use of bold, clearly defined colour — all the more striking given his red-green colourblindness — suggests a growing confidence with chromatic storytelling. The palette is unambiguous, unapologetic. The textures are tactile: the ridges of a knitted blanket, the luminous slick of a laptop screen, the dim fuzz of evening light. The artist's former belief in the “necessary suffering” of the creative process is here quietly dismantled — not through manifesto, but through mise-en-scène. This is painting as self-reclamation, not performance. It’s a private moment made public, a domestic vignette elevated to narrative. And in its quietude, Self Portrait carries a radical charge: that art can emerge not only from adversity, but from affection, idleness, and ease. That the artist, like the viewer, is most human when simply lying down — not to die, but to watch, to rest, to begin again.
Lilies of the Valley
Oil on Canvas
100 x 140cm, 100 x 160cm, and 100 x 120cm
2022
In collaboration with Pauline P. Raybaud, with performers Rachael Harrison and Marah J. Jah and costumes by Kelsey Dikes
In Lilies of the Valley, a monumental triptych borne of collaboration between artists, dancers, and fashion designers, the figures are not so much represented as embodied and then released, as if from some chamber of silence into a space of gesture, breath, and tremor. The canvases, each well over a metre tall, confront us not only with scale but with presence.
These are not portraits in the conventional sense, nor are they simple studies in figure or costume. Rather, they are moments, held moments, of poise and peril, surrender and strength, each woman poised as if in a moment between prayer and protest.
The title, Lilies of the Valley, immediately evokes that strange, paradoxical flower: delicate, poisonous, symbolic of sweetness and sorrow. It’s a title that does not merely describe the women pictured here but deepens their mythos. These lilies, far from fading into the valley’s undergrowth, rise.
What makes Lilies of the Valley so affecting, so alive, is the visible trace of collaboration. You can feel the movement of dancers echoed in the drape and drag of garments designed not just for show, but for expression. The bodies are not simply posed; they are inhabited. The fabric is not drapery, but costume, a second skin. These women are not muses: they are co-authors of the emotion that ripples through each work. Each painting becomes a stage, each figure a soloist in a silent aria.
