Wright, Clifton
Clifton Wright has pursued portraiture for over a decade, working in response to family albums, newspaper and magazine pictures, exhibition documentation and characters from science fiction and popular culture. The faces in his drawings are often woven into and entangled with abstract patterns. For Self-Portrait from Mirror, 2018, Wright began by making pencil drawings of himself, observing within his face the tessellation of shapes. He said: ‘It is the shapes in the face and the colours in the face that tell me what the drawing is going to be. My work is more about that abstract stuff than who the person is […] I use the structure of how things slot in to the face, and continue it, like a jigsaw puzzle, across the rest of the picture’. Transferring this linear drawing onto four different sheets of paper, he used pencil, oil pastel, oil stick and charcoal to experiment with the pictorial puzzle of representation. The way that face and space fit, knot and flow together are as much the focus of his work as the specific forms of any particular face.
- Artwork Details: 35 x 50cm
- Edition:
- Material description: Oil pastel, pencil and pen on paper
- Credit line: © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and Intoart, London
- Theme:
- Medium: Drawing
- Accession number: ACC13/2019