FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY
Paul is currently working on an a new series, Trompe L'Oeil, which will be exhibited at the Irina Lensky Gallery in May, 2009
EYEMAZING and SILVERSHOTZ
Paul Kilsby's work and an extensive interview featured in Eyemazing magazine, Issue 03 - 2007. Go to www.eyemazing.com. His work will featured in Silvershotz magazine, the international journal of fine art photography. Go to www.silvershotz.com. The issue featured works from The Seer & The Seen series with an article by the novelist and broadcaster, Alex Martin.
Paul was a guest speaker at PhotoStroud Festival of Photography in October 2007 and included in the group exhibition 31 Studio at the Subscription Rooms.
Paul's photographs were included as part of an exhibition called Oil & Silver at Hoopers Gallery in London from Friday 2nd February until March 2nd 2007. This was a group exhibition exploring dialogues between painting and photography in contemporary fine art practice. The exhibition also included work by Mark Bolland, Nicky Coutts, Nicholas Middleton and Jorma Puranen. Go to www.hoopersgallery.co.uk, archived exhibitions section for details. You can see prints by Paul by appointment at: Hoopers Gallery, 15 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0AA, telephone 020 7490 3908
PAUL KILSBY trained originally in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the University of Wales. About fifteen years ago he began specialising in the medium of photography. At the same time, he began to research overlooked European artists involved in making photographs but whose work had been marginalised within Modernist histories of photography. This research, undertaken in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Russia and France, was brought together in a Ph D at the Royal College of Art in London. It also had a growing impact on his own imagery which turned more and more upon exploring the relationship between photography and the history of painting. He began to work with reproductions of paintings, manipulating them in many ways - sometimes by tearing, sometimes by burning, often by adding extra objects and imagery to create small scale tableaux which he then photographed. This body of work was gathered together as both an exhibition and a book, The Seer & The Seen.Since that time Kilsby has continued to focus on the relationship between painting and photography. In 2006 he exhibited a new body of work, After Vermeer, at Hoopers Gallery, London, which explores the ways in which the Dutch painter's imagery reveals a 'photographic' look due to his use of a camera obscura. Kilsby uses a variety of techniques to revisit Vermeer's paintings. In some he reworks Vermeer's compositions, bringing characters from different paintings into fresh combinations. In others, he throws areas out of focus, emphasising the restricted depth of field Vermeer must have experienced as he peered into the ground glass screen of his camera obscura. Another technique involves folding, scoring and reworking reproductions to create 'optical' obsctructions. These photographs are conceived as explorations, meditations, homages. Kilsby is currently working on a new series of photographs inspired by the genre of trompe l'oeil, again combining reproductions with his own interventions.
Please use the guest book to submit your own responses to these photographs or to make enquiries about purchasing copies from the limited editions.
Please also visit www.31-studio.com for details of high quality studio platinum printing
Also visit www.nickyakehurst.com for further details about exhibiting the After Vermeer series
Virginia Khuri wrote the following piece for Lipservice, the magazine of the London Independent Photography group.
Please also visit www.31-studio.com for details of high quality studio platinum printing
Also visit www.nickyakehurst.com for further details about exhibiting the After Vermeer series
Virginia Khuri wrote the following piece for Lipservice, the magazine of the London Independent Photography group.
What is the relationship between photography and 17th
century Dutch painting? A recent exhibition entitled After
Vermeer at Hoopers Gallery in London presented the
work of Paul Kilsby who explores this question through
focusing his medium format camera on reproductions of
paintings by Johannes Vermeer.
His current images have evolved from that work and from an
exhibition and book entitled The Seer and the Seen in which he
explored the intensity of the gaze, both photographic and painterly.
Here reproductions of paintings were torn, cut, burned, collaged
and added too with objects before being photographed. This recent
work is not so radical; the manipulations are more subtle - and
limited to the work of one painter, Vermeer.
Vermeer seems an appropriate choice as it is now confirmed that
he used a ‘camera obscura’ in planning his paintings. (See Philip
Steadman and David Hockney). If the photographic image from the
‘camera obscura’ was the beginning of a painting, then Paul’s use
of his camera - just another box with a lens attached - to make
a final image seems to complete a circle. Optical seeing through
use of the Camera Obscura is what gives the paintings their very
modern-seeming veracity; when photographed, the stillness in the
painting becomes transformed into a photographic caught moment,
just a glimpse of everyday life. By using a particular quality of lens-
sight (as opposed to painterly eye-sight), depth of field or differential
focus, Paul manages to turn the timelessness of a painting into a
filmic encapsulation of specific time. What was in a painting a stilled
gaze becomes in the photograph a momentarily captured glance.
Whereas the paintings are theatrical, geometrically composed and
precisely lit, the photographs of them become film stills, incomplete
and questioning. The use of parts of pictures, geometric interferences
and of half drawn curtains seems to refer to and augment this
transformation.
The one image which seems to me to sum up the relationship of
painting to photograph is The Geographer in which cones extend
out from the geographer’s eye to the near window and from his hand
across to the opposite side of the frame. The eye and the gesture of
hands are constant themes in all the images and are both involved in
the transformations from painterly to photographic meaning. And it
seems to ask the eternal question, what produces the ‘art’, hand or
eye? Is he trying to chart the future of image making?
Finally, it is fitting that these images were printed large, as large
as some paintings (20”x24”) and using the long tonalities of the
19th century platinum/palladium process, he has transformed the
delicate light and rich colours of the original paintings into the equally
sensuous and glowing tones of a photographic print. Paul worked
very closely with the printers at 31 Studio to make both the large
computer generated negatives and from them contact prints on the
coated watercolour paper. These sixteen beautiful prints, homages
to Vermeer, when hung in the elegant space of Hoopers Gallery,
were a delight to both eye and mind.
Paul Kilsby is known to many LIP members through the workshops he has
given for the group. (See a review by Nancye Gualt in the April 2000 LIP
magazine.) His background education was in fine arts, training as a sculptor,
but he is currently a lecturer in photography at the Royal College of Art where
he gained his PhD with a study of modernist European photography.
century Dutch painting? A recent exhibition entitled After
Vermeer at Hoopers Gallery in London presented the
work of Paul Kilsby who explores this question through
focusing his medium format camera on reproductions of
paintings by Johannes Vermeer.
His current images have evolved from that work and from an
exhibition and book entitled The Seer and the Seen in which he
explored the intensity of the gaze, both photographic and painterly.
Here reproductions of paintings were torn, cut, burned, collaged
and added too with objects before being photographed. This recent
work is not so radical; the manipulations are more subtle - and
limited to the work of one painter, Vermeer.
Vermeer seems an appropriate choice as it is now confirmed that
he used a ‘camera obscura’ in planning his paintings. (See Philip
Steadman and David Hockney). If the photographic image from the
‘camera obscura’ was the beginning of a painting, then Paul’s use
of his camera - just another box with a lens attached - to make
a final image seems to complete a circle. Optical seeing through
use of the Camera Obscura is what gives the paintings their very
modern-seeming veracity; when photographed, the stillness in the
painting becomes transformed into a photographic caught moment,
just a glimpse of everyday life. By using a particular quality of lens-
sight (as opposed to painterly eye-sight), depth of field or differential
focus, Paul manages to turn the timelessness of a painting into a
filmic encapsulation of specific time. What was in a painting a stilled
gaze becomes in the photograph a momentarily captured glance.
Whereas the paintings are theatrical, geometrically composed and
precisely lit, the photographs of them become film stills, incomplete
and questioning. The use of parts of pictures, geometric interferences
and of half drawn curtains seems to refer to and augment this
transformation.
The one image which seems to me to sum up the relationship of
painting to photograph is The Geographer in which cones extend
out from the geographer’s eye to the near window and from his hand
across to the opposite side of the frame. The eye and the gesture of
hands are constant themes in all the images and are both involved in
the transformations from painterly to photographic meaning. And it
seems to ask the eternal question, what produces the ‘art’, hand or
eye? Is he trying to chart the future of image making?
Finally, it is fitting that these images were printed large, as large
as some paintings (20”x24”) and using the long tonalities of the
19th century platinum/palladium process, he has transformed the
delicate light and rich colours of the original paintings into the equally
sensuous and glowing tones of a photographic print. Paul worked
very closely with the printers at 31 Studio to make both the large
computer generated negatives and from them contact prints on the
coated watercolour paper. These sixteen beautiful prints, homages
to Vermeer, when hung in the elegant space of Hoopers Gallery,
were a delight to both eye and mind.
Paul Kilsby is known to many LIP members through the workshops he has
given for the group. (See a review by Nancye Gualt in the April 2000 LIP
magazine.) His background education was in fine arts, training as a sculptor,
but he is currently a lecturer in photography at the Royal College of Art where
he gained his PhD with a study of modernist European photography.