The starting point for this series of works was an interest in depicting voyeurism. This is one of the most foundational concepts in film studies but I wanted to see what would happen when I explored it through painting. I began selecting stills scenes of women under surveillance from mundane crime tv shows as subjects for my paintings. I was influenced by Mandy Patinkin’s comments on his reason for leaving the cast of Criminal Minds. He questioned why the show’s plot formula tortured and killed women on a routine weekly basis. The same observation about repetition and banal violence would seemingly apply to a vast range of crime tv.

My aim was to see what my painting process would reveal about this genre and the social pre-occupations which drive its popularity. The actual TV storylines in which these images are entrenched sometimes offer surprising inflections and reversals of the gaze which are not obvious from a still frame but I am less interested in how these TV images fit within their text of origin than in how they function as part of a mass of repetitions.

Voyeurism is looking at a remove from the object. It is about both intimacy and distance. In the process of painting I enjoyed playing with the pull between the desire to look into a scene and barriers to vision which block and obscure the human figure.