Colin McMaster was born in Belfast in the 70's and after studying at Central St.Martins continues to live and work in London. McMaster paints stereotypes rather than individuals, meshing references from the photographic storyboards of romantic comics and their heightened sense of melodrama, with the more sinister undertones of American film noir and pulp crime novels. The subjects are superficially attractive but there is an underlying sense of their narcissism and perhaps even their engagement in acts which the viewer is compelled to interpret as illicit. As a result, the viewer is cast as a voyeur, the perception of what's taking place in the paintings suspended in a double take, in an ambivalence between observation and accusation. Stylistically, the work owes much to the Pop Art movement. The smoothness of the picture surface and the mannequin-like quality of the figures heightens the feeling of artifice and blurs our sense of looking at a painted image. McMaster usually works on panels of wood veneer, framed in linen - a reversal of the traditional materials used. Although recently he has tried to incorporate a more 3-dimensional aspect to his work, producing cut-out paintings assembled from different types of wood veneer cut and glued together, alongside flatly painted segments. Colin McMaster was born in Belfast in the 70's and after studying at Central St.Martins continues to live and work in London. McMaster paints stereotypes rather than individuals, meshing references from the photographic storyboards of romantic comics and their heightened sense of melodrama, with the more sinister undertones of American film noir and pulp crime novels. The subjects are superficially attractive but there is an underlying sense of their narcissism and perhaps even their engagement in acts which the viewer is compelled to interpret as illicit. As a result, the viewer is cast as a voyeur, the perception of what's taking place in the paintings suspended in a double take, in an ambivalence between observation and accusation. Stylistically, the work owes much to the Pop Art movement. The smoothness of the picture surface and the mannequin-like quality of the figures heightens the feeling of artifice and blurs our sense of looking at a painted image. McMaster usually works on panels of wood veneer, framed in linen - a reversal of the traditional materials used. Although recently he has tried to incorporate a more 3-dimensional aspect to his work, producing cut-out paintings assembled from different types of wood veneer cut and glued together, alongside flatly painted segments.
