Recent work

Jayne Sandys-Renton:

I make large-scale expressive paintings from photographs by other artists, appropriating their images and reworking them in a new manner so they become mine, but with an echo of their origin.

Sometimes they form part of an investigation into photographers and video artists who research painters who, in turn, have investigated beauty in relation to death. For this body of work I was inspired by a video installation by Bill Viola, shown in the Venice Biennale ‘07. I was drawn to the drama of Viola’s figures emerging from the darkness, representing dead people coming back momentarily to our world. I have moved on to work directly from other contemporary artists like Sam Taylor-Wood and Francesca Woodman, and to look at the painter Titian and his use of the figure in unreal poses based on mythological characters.

Other times they are portraits of well-known artists, often from the front cover of ‘modern painters’ magazine. The Photograph of Luc Tuymans offered the potential for many layers of meaning, as Tuymans makes his own ambiguous, powerful paintings using images he has taken from a simple Polaroid camera. My own Painting of him was a response to the traditional and contemporary investigation of the art world I had been combining in my own work.