Cross Style: Why Not Everything I Paint Is Candy Decay

Candy Decay is my language. Bright, crowded, sweet, slightly wrong. It is what people recognize, it is what I am asked for, and it is what most of this shop is made of.

It is not everything I paint.

What Cross Style is

Cross Style is the new corner of the shop for work that sits outside that language. Some of it is older work that I still like too much to leave in a drawer. Some of it happens because I want to change subject, medium or approach for a week and see what comes back. It is not a rebrand and it is not a second identity. It is a shelf.

Two pieces are on it so far.

Kingfisher No. 01

The bird is painted straight. Real colors, real feathers, the blue and orange doing what a kingfisher actually does. And then it is perched on a skull, over a loose pink wash, in front of rows of pink dashes that describe nothing at all, with handwriting running along the top edge.

So it is an observational bird study that could not quite keep a straight face. That tension is exactly why I like it, and it is a reasonable description of what Cross Style is for.

Pigeon Couple No. 02

Two pigeons, very close together, one busy with the other's feathers. Painted carefully, right down to the oil-slick green and purple on the necks. Then a block of pixels sits across the chest like the image has glitched, a blue cloud holds them up, one yellow line loops around the pair, and there is a bee and a tiny bow in the mix.

Anyone who has read why I keep painting pigeons will not be surprised that the first romantic piece in a new series is two city birds on a cloud.

Why they are numbered

No. 01 and No. 02 are a promise rather than a filing system. I number the Food Studies the same way, and it does something useful to how I work: a numbered piece is part of a series that is allowed to keep going, so I do not have to decide in advance what the series will eventually be about.

It is still the same hands

Put the two birds next to a Candy Decay painting and the family resemblance is embarrassing. Pink turns up where pink has no business being. Animals, again. Strong outlines, layers, a lot of careful looking, and then one element that refuses to behave.

That is the part I find reassuring, and it is the argument I made in How to Find Your Art Style: a style is not your subject, it is the stack of choices underneath it. Change the bird, keep the choices, and it still comes out looking like you. If you want the long list of names people have tried to file my work under, that lives in Every Label People Have Given My Art.

Where to find it

Everything in the series lives in the Cross Style collection. Both pieces come as 21 × 21 cm / 8.27 × 8.27 in hand-signed prints for 35 euro, printed and signed in my studio with the embossed artist stamp, as larger wall art prints, and as digital downloads for 9,90 euro.

More will land on this shelf. I just refuse to promise what it will be.