James Dearlove

Two Figures in a Garden

2021

James Dearlove (b.1975, British) is a contemporary painter who lives and works on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, UK. His work presents a twilit, chimerical realm haunted by figures, animals and hybrids. He is preoccupied with how humans leave a trace of their presence on the world; the way a body can electrify a room, or the trajectory of a figure running across a park. When painting the intimate, visceral reality of light falling on flesh or bodies coalescing with their surroundings, he seeks at the same time to uncover more metaphysical and sometimes more violent aspects of the human presence. Ultimately he seeks to explore both the desire and the disquietude in the human experience through his own experience as a queer man living and working both in the heart of the city and more recently in rural isolation.