Creating Lust

Finding the Face of Desire

Lust presented me with a problem almost immediately.

What does Lust actually look like?

I struggled with the face.

I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want the obvious seductive expression, the pout, conventional beauty or any of the familiar clichés we have come to associate with desire.

That felt too easy.

I wanted something less polished and more instinctive. Something uncomfortable. Something that captured the raw, primal energy of Lust rather than simply showing somebody who looked desirable.

Finding that face took time.

I experimented with different expressions, and in the second image of this gallery you'll see one of those earlier possibilities superimposed in the corner of my preparatory sketch. I deliberately placed it there so you can compare the face I was considering with the one I eventually chose.

The earlier version wasn't necessarily wrong.

It just wasn't my Lust.

It still felt too familiar, too close to an image of seduction we already recognise.

So I pushed it further.

The face that eventually emerged was more primal. Desire was no longer posing for the viewer. I wanted it to feel urgent, physical and almost beyond the point of caring how it appeared.

That changed everything.

A face can determine the emotional direction of an entire painting, and I knew that if I didn't believe in Lust's expression, nothing I subsequently built around it would convince me either.

I wasn't trying to paint someone looking sexy.

I was trying to paint Lust itself.

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Building Around the Impulse

Once I had found the face, I could begin constructing the world around it.

And there is an interesting contradiction in the way Lust was created.

Lust suggests impulse.

Painting it required control.

The early stages are broad. Colour begins establishing the atmosphere, forms strengthen and the different areas of the composition gradually find their place.

Then, as always happens with these paintings, I move closer.

The brushes become smaller.

The details multiply.

What initially appears to be one image begins breaking into many smaller incidents, each requiring its own decisions and hours of work.

The painting becomes richer and increasingly complicated until the loose beginnings are almost completely buried beneath the finished surface.

These photographs preserve that journey.

They aren't here to explain every figure, object or symbol you will eventually see. That would take us into an entirely different story.

The Artist Journal explains what Lust means.

The Creation Gallery shows you how I found Lust and then built the painting around it.

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Watch Lust Take Shape

Begin with the early sketches and look particularly at those two different faces.

One shows a direction I could have taken.

The other became Lust.

From there, follow the colour, layers and increasingly intricate detail as the painting moves towards its finished form.

Because before I could explore everything Lust might provoke, conceal or destroy, I first had to answer the question that had been troubling me from the beginning:

What does Lust look like when you strip away the cliché?