Tag: graphic design

Tomas Clayton

The Artwork of Tomas Clayton

Born in 1957 in Birmingham, Tomas Clayton is an English portrait painter who specializes in oils on masonite works. After his parents’ divorce early in his life, the absence of a father figure had an impact on his life that still to some extent permeates the subject and mood of his work. In the late 1960s, Clayton’s mother remarried and the family moved to Hereford where Clayton was awarded a three year Art Foundation Course at the Hereford Art College. 

Clayton returned to Birmingham where he studied graphic design and illustration at the Ruskin Hall College of Art. After leaving college, he worked as a graphic designer and animator for the British Broadcasting Company and Central Independent Television, now known as ITV Central. Several years later, Clayton became a successful freelance graphic designer and illustrator for several corporations. 

In the late 1970s, Tomas Clayton discovered a cache of vintage photographs that included formal portraits and images of family gatherings taken in the late 1800s to the early 1900s. The presence of all the lost personalities, dressed in their stiff collars and corsets, made a strong impression on the style of Clayton’s later work. Other influences were the many painters and illustrators who had captured his imagination in the early 1970s. Among these were Scottish illustrator and painter Wilson McLean, American illustrator Brad Holland, French illustrator Jean Giraud also known as Moebius, and American graphic artist Paul Davis, a Hall of Fame member of the Society of Illustrators.

Clayton’s portraits have a very distinctive style that is carefully created with great attention to detail. Inspired by the nostalgic portraits and artifacts of the First World War era, he creates highly stylized images of actors and soldiers, as well as average men and women, that blend elements of that period with contemporary imagery. The surface areas of Clayton’s portraits are textural and display a surrealistic effect through his use of monochromatic tones. While the face is central to any portrait, the eyes of Clayton’s subjects become, in many of his works, the major focus. Dates written in Roman numerals occasionally are included in his images..

From 2007 to 2023, Tomas Clayton has shown his work in many group exhibitions including regular presentations at the Royal Portrait Society, New English Art Club and Mall Galleries at Saint James, London. In 2016, Clayton won the Columbia Threadneedle Prize for both his “Après la Guerre (After the War)” and “Chère Capucine (Dear Capucine)”, a portrait of a young man playing his resonator at a Parisian night club.

Tomas Clayton is represented by The Contemporary Fine Art Gallery Eton located upstairs at The Piper Art Bar building in Windsor, Berkshire, United Kingdom. Clayton’s work can be found at: https://www.cfag.co.uk/exhibition_thumbs.php?exhibition_id=319&show_rand=0&show_biog=1

Tomas Clayton’s website, which contains contact information for commissioned work, is located at:  https://www.tomasclayton.co.uk

Top Insert Image: Tomas Clayton, “Her Name Was Magill”, Oil on Masonite, 67 x 85.1 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Tomas Clayton, “Blue-eyed Boy”, 2012, Oil on Masonite, 81 x 90.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Tomas Clayton, “The Serpent”, Oil on Masonite, 65 x 65 cm, Private Collection

Gori Mora

The Artwork of Gori Mora

Born in 1992 in Mallorca, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, Gori Mora is a painter who currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2011, he moved to Barcelona where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Barcelona University. Mora relocated to Glasgow in 2017 to study the Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. After the completion of his Master’s program, he was awarded a John Kinross Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh to spend research time in Florence. Mora’s 2018 project “My Florence Souvenir” is now part of the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh collection.

The focus of Gori Mora’s work is the exploration of the myriad effects that technology has on our social interactions, our intrinsic values, and our self-identification. Through examining human interactions on social networks, the roles and eroticism involved and the current trends of the platforms, Mora explores in his paintings both the queer community’s history and the heightened effect that technology has on the nature of desire.

Mora’s compositions, systematic arrangements of stylized objects and figures, are painted in oils on the reverse side of transparent plastic sheets made of polymethyl methacrylate. The prominent figures and objects in the front layer are painted first with subsequent layers of background added later to increase the depth of the image. The finished work is viewed from the smooth, unpainted side of the perspex sheet, with the thickness of that sheet creating a curious sense of depth to the image. 

In Gori Mora’s work, parts of his scenes are sectioned off with screens or framed within mirrors that offer perspectives seen from different angles. Many of the male figures are portrayed either complete or fragmented in form and often shown in various states of repose. Objects seen everyday, such as socks, belts, glasses, smoking cigarettes and electronic devices, are carefully arranged throughout most of his images. In Mora’s work, there is a strong sense of illustrative graphic design seen in his balanced compositions, stylized forms, and use of background patterns. 

Mora had his first solo exhibition in Spain in March of 2022, entitled “Layering Intimacy” at the Galeria Pelaires in Mallorca. His work has been shown in such group exhibitions as the MUTUO Cultural Art Center in 2015, the 2015 “Konvent Punt Zero” held at Barcelona’s Centre Cultural d’Art, the Museu de Porreres in Majorca in 2017, the Casa de Cultura de Felanitz in Majorca in 2019, the 2019 TRAMWAY exhibition in Glasgow, the 2020 “V2React” exhibition in Miami, BEERS London Gallery in 2021, The Royal Scottish Academy exhibition in 2021, and the Tuesday to Friday Gallery in Valencia in 2022, among others.  

Note: Reverse painting on glass is an historic art form. It has been popular in Europe since ancient times; glass painted using this technique has even been found in Assyrian and Phoenician civilizations. Qualified as a “scientific art”, reverse glass painting reached its peak during the Renaissance period when it had widely influenced art in Venice, Italy. It was favored since the eighteenth-century by the Church and nobility throughout Central Europe and was widely used for sacred paintings and icons in the Byzantine Empire.

The technique was used by the middle of the nineteenth-century on folk art from Bohemia and Bavaria, and such commercial products as clock faces. By the middle of the twentieth-century, the technique of reverse painting had fallen out of fashion and nearly disappeared. With the creation and rapid rise in use of polymer glazing, new paint compositions were made by combining oil and acrylic paints that made reverse painting possible on these supports. 

Gori Mora’s Instagram site can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/gori.mora/?hl=en

Second Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Smoke & Sand”, 2020, Oil on Perspex, 115 x 70 cm

Third Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Reverie”, 2021, Oil on Perspex, 101 x 105 cm