D.Minus North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
D Minus is a visual artist, based on the Yorkshire coast, England. He makes original paintings and prints, often hand finishing with paint markers, spraypaint and/or carefully applied gold or silver leaf. Most finished pieces involve days of work and dozens of different intertwined layers.
D Minus is a visual artist, based on the Yorkshire coast, England. He studied Art and Photography in Sheffield and Swansea, where he developed an array of interests and skills, eventually leading into press photography and printing.
He now makes original paintings and prints, often hand finishing with paint markers, spraypaint and/or carefully applied gold or silver leaf. Most finished pieces involve days of work and dozens of different intertwined layers.
As an artist and photographer, He has exhibited and sold work in many parts of the world, and had images published in over sixty countries.
In recent years, D Minus has been limited by the decreasing use of his legs, due to a progressive nerve disease. This has led him to concentrate on digital portraits, some real, some invented - adapting his style of painting, and digitally weaving images from traditional photography and the use of text to image, Artificial Intelligence.
As a disabled artist, the ability to use Al, constructing and refining complex scripts - to digitally grow realistic faces, has become integral to his working practice. These faces get blended with other images from three decades of his own photography, in a method that is very organic - the piece of work altering and evolving with each layer.
Life, his past, present experiences and improving technology, influence him, as does the colour work of artists from Francis Bacon to Nick Grindrod and Fin DAC. D Minus states he's creating the kind of images he attempted to make in the mid 90s, but with hardware and software that is now capable of meeting his requirements and ideas.
He is constantly motivated by the fact that someone wants to repeatedly and regularly view something he has created - giving it value and appreciation by hanging it on a wall. "I consider that to be the ultimate compliment". His combination of multiple layers and mark making considers our vulnerability, transience, notions and narratives of grief, loss and change - whilst aiming for a sense of beauty, strength, boldness and visual clout. This is part of who he is, and how he tries to be. It's a process he enjoys and finds almost meditative.
