David McClyment

“I had begun exploring portraiture in past exhibitions that were about personality, expression and identity. But these portraits were of fictitious people, made up of bits and pieces of encounters. They were either composites of everyone, or of no one in particular. I enjoyed the challenge, but I wanted more.

The next obvious step would be to tackle portraits of actual people whom I knew intimately. I began with myself, moved to my long time loving partner and then to our imminently talented son. And like any other portraiture, these explored the complexity and multiplicity of personalities that make up any one “individual”. Are we really ever more than just strangers to ourselves and to each other?

Four different portraits – each one handled in a slightly different way, each one hinting at yet another deeper and almost hidden aspect, represent each person. The title of the exhibition Something About Small deliberately contradicts the large-scale nature of these portraits: each being approximately 6 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Yet each portrait is made up of literally thousands of intricately detailed, tiny facets of line, colour and tone, like the skin on the billboard-sized heads being scrutinized under a high-powered microscope.

Something About Small is intentionally created on regular cardboard, using hardware store spray bombs that are sprayed repeatedly through hand-cut stencils in a real low-tech, mass media technology. The fleeting expressions of the portraits are matched by the ephemeral quality of the materials.”

David McClyment