Cameron (1992) is a London based artist born in Helensburgh, Scotland. He holds a BA in Fine Art and graduated last year with an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds London Art School. Recent exhibitions include Selects: Vol II with the London Paint Club at Koppel Project Space, NOW with Studio West, and a solo show with Taymour Grahne Projects.
Cameron paints everyday scenes based mostly on candid photographs of people in the city. His aim is to present and defamiliarize the overlooked, understated, fleeting moments in life, imbuing the everyday with a sense of beauty and even grandeur.
As a teenager, Cameron was drawn to photographs from old family photo albums. The moments captured in these images resonated with him both in terms of their untold stories and the visual quality of analogue photography, with its other-worldly colours, unexpected compositions and softening of details. Vernacular photography seemed to contain an unintended beauty and pathos.
Film is another important influence for Cameron in terms of this elevating of everyday subject matter and the telling of untold stories in, for example, the social realism of British kitchen-sink dramas. He is especially interested in pictorial devices, and how these can be used to create a psychological landscape as in the work of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Wong Kar Wai. By making use of such filmic qualities in his work, a narrative is suggested, one that is left open for the viewer to interpret.
In addition to film and photography, the tactility of oil paint has always appealed to Cameron. Oil paint, in the quality of its application – the brushstroke – can lend itself well to a shorthand expression of detail which helps create ambiguity and an open narrative, inviting the viewer to question what they are looking at, and why the artist wants us to look.
The ‘everyday’ is the main theme of his work, with a focus on city life and more recently on the tension between togetherness and isolation in urban environments. Within this, Cameron’s paintings gesture towards the ongoing conveyer belt of consumerism: mannequins, supermarket shelves, vending machines, fast food outlets and delivery drivers. He sees these as signifiers for the disposable, fast-paced, detached lives we live today.