Artwork Description:-
Manipulated digital photography inspired by both the compositional structure of Roy Lichtenstein’s ’Explosion’ (1965-6) and the heavy, nimbus fluidity of Kim Keever’s aquarium photography. It is proverbial explosion of colour and exuberant creativity.
Biography:-
Although the very successful Fine Art Degree graduate, in 1995, of Southampton’s Solent University, in the UK (where his endeavours evolved from figurative painting to video and performance), Vin Warrican chose not to further pursue an academic art practice.
Instead he settled upon what he saw as a necessary familial duty for the benefit of his parents.
It was a decision that, for a time, allow Warrican to engage in a somewhat dilettante, but nonetheless, atypical art practice centred around video screen capture, slide projection and analogue in-camera techniques. The subsequent solo and group exhibitions he participated in embroided a colourful thread through an otherwise unremarkable tapestry of office employment.
Familial duty would eventually lead Warrican to witness the sudden and irrevocable demise of his father, Kemel, to work-related cancer in 2009. Towards the end of the same year, his mother would manifest the unmistakable signs of and, consequently, be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
This gut-plunging axis shifting development made it a necessity for Warrican to become his mother’s sole carer, and in so doing give up employment and other pursuits. It was a role he would fulfil for the next ten years.
And yet, within this decade of repetition, routine and reassurance, where the parent became the child and the child the parent, Warrican was slowly able to develop a new art practice for himself.
At first implementing a carthartic regime to punctuate the many chores he performed as a caregiver, Warrican began to construct and fashion one sixth scale figures from disparate and purchasable doll and action figure parts. Known as ’kitbashing’, this hobby became an almost Frankenstein-like undertaking but without the horror and dire existential consequence of Mary Shelley’s novel.
Over many months, this growing troupe of plastic homunculi became photographic subjects. Thus, at day’s end with chores completed and while his mother slept, Warrican embarked on a new photographic practice.
The employment of an android smartphone, with its default editing features, proved to be a revelatory experience due to its accessibility and immediacy for editing and further manipulation- a veritable darkroom at his fingertips.
For the next few years, both Warrican’s carthartic exercise of kitbashing and photographic practice evolved side by side and, respectively, became more sophisticated.
Eventually, the seemingly inevitable realisation of each figurative composition no longer satisfied. The unplanned abstract details in the backgrounds of these pictures- the result of a palimpsest of filters and painterly manipulation- began to fascinate Warrican with their beauty and colour.
By 2015, Warrican began to explore greater abstraction within his photography. It was this exploration that marked the move away from cathartic exercise to a far more considered and aesthetic creativity.
This embracing of abstraction heralded the production of more colourful and process-heavy compositions such as ’The Proverbial Explosion’ (2015), the very flagship of his new Art.
The summer of 2018saw the passing of his mother, Inez, at the age of ninety-three.
Profoundly bereft of purpose for months afterwards, Warrican would come to realise the true legacy of that choice he made twenty-five years ago upon graduating. A legacy made further manifest during the ten years that he cared for his mother: a committed art practice uniquely his own to pursue unhindered, and without burden.
Employing smartphone technology and digital techniques I strive to pursue a painterly aesthetic within my photography.
In concert with both abstract and figurative practices I explore how colour and composition create cohesion.
The resulting works, deconstructive and manipulated, invite myriad interpretations.
An abiding emphasis on aesthetics allows me to seduce the eye, and encourage an increasing dynamic between viewer and artist as regards the duality between interpretation and intent.