Paschal Lawton

My painted work is largely concerned with human perspectives on the natural world, that gaze infused with a kind of kitsch sentimentality. Leafing through the postcards in the Natural History Museum gift shop, you might catch the acrid mix of formaldehyde and varnish in the air and have a philosophical moment. There is a discontinuity forced on the spectrum of the world in this institution, but this is necessary for us to describe it. It is a kind of magic to me that we cannot see the world without naming it. There is a fundamental loss occurring when we remove something from its place in the spectrum of our experience. This strange problem is the thread common to the subject of my painted work, but it is a model of a problem poignant to the artist who must position themselves in the field of culture in order to participate in the debate. I see this debate as largely artificial, and art history as a narrative which ultimately serves to commodify the one area of culture which can be free of it.