Stephen Somers

As a way of exorcising disturbing states of mind, painting can be very therapeutic. Sometimes it's more comic than tragic in the end. I like the work to have a cinematic believability to it, as though it were a scene from an unmade movie or parallel reality. The properties of acrylic and it's ability to feel simultaneously like a drawing and a painting are important to me. Switching up my process helps the growth of ideas. Sometimes it's useful to be very calculated, other times total improvisation takes over. Working in other mediums like music and video provides insight into ideas of layering, rhythm and randomness that feed back into the paintings.