Henry Blond British, b. 1974
In his medium to large-scale portrait and figurative paintings, Henry Blond highlights the intricate complexities present in the ordinary moments of life, reimagining and placing them firmly center stage. Through decontextualization of the figure, he explores a repositioning of quotidian narrative offering a uniquely new delineation of those unrehearsed passages of daily human experience.
Born in 1974 in Liverpool, England, Blond’s diversely creative background has taken him on a journey through music, graphic design and the visual arts. He earned a BA Hons degree in Jazz Studies from the City of Leeds College of Music and worked as a professional musician for over 15 years. Following a decade running his own graphic design business, he is now pursuing and focusing on a full-time career in painting.
Integrating his varied creative practices, Blond successfully manages to craft these artistic disciplines into his painting. His rhythmic brushwork, strong compositional sense and dynamic color range all intertwine to create a powerful, expressive and arresting style.
Blond is a direct painter, working in the ‘alla prima’ style of paint application, favoring a spontaneous and energetic look to his finished work. His passages of semi-realism contrast with loose interpretation, allowing form to strongly emerge from a stark setting to skillfully engage the viewer’s eye.
Built from a textured surface, the subject is sculpted with a mosaic of broad brushstrokes and energetic marks. The image is captured between the lines of what is rendered and what is implied, reflecting not mere representations of people but rather an exploration of human need and psychological state. These depictions are all the more exposed through stripping the image of its milieu and immediate intentions. So composed is Blond’s work, it is at the acme of portraiture and human figuration, revealing the raw honesty and emotional essence of the human condition.
As the human subject is the primary source of Blond’s inspiration, subjectivity is found in the subtle details – a certain tilt of the head, a shifting of weight, or an inquisitively fixed stare. Blond moves to capture the revelatory intricacies of such moments and he paints to give them the time, space and stage that they fully deserve.
