Roy Amiss

I came across these images purely by accident in autumn 2009. I had never heard of Roy Amiss before this point and so it was a shock to see art similar to my own stripe pictures that I had produced from 1995-1997. Works like Spectre of Love have a charge to it that I hope comes close to matching that of Amiss’ optical paintings impact. Amiss is far better equipped to be an artist and a thinker than I and has developed his stripe painting beyond my own capabilities.

This is from the artist’s statement from the Saatchi Gallery website: “Great influences on me have been the ideas of surrealism, philosophy and science - the latter playing an increasing role in my late work. In terms of people, I would cite: the celebrated British philosophers David Hume and Alfred North Whitehead and the artists Dali, Raphael and Da Vinci. I have a great passion for experimentation and use a great variety of materials such as: oil paint, acrylic, pencil, ink, watercolour, chalk, wood, glass, net or vitrage, agar, and chemicals. These materials I have employed in paintings, drawings and objects. Similarly, the techniques I have developed are also diverse: old master glazing and drawing techniques; collage and photo-transfers; the exploitation of optical properties of various materials: automatism, accident and chance; frottage (Ernst) and the paranoiac critical method (Dali): the culturing of bacteria; the application of mathematics” (Amiss, Saatchi 2003-10).

Amiss also cites Ernst and his Frottage technique as an influence and adopts similar approaches to image making.

Atomic Whitehead 1998

Disjunctive David Bowie Clones 1999





Striped Madonna 2000




Quantum miles Davis 2001

Robert De Niro 2004

Leonardo di Capprio 2004

Drew Barrymore 2004

Muybridge to Infinity 2005

The man with no name 2005

Storm in a Teacup 2006




Roy Amiss at the Saatchi Gallery: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Roy+Amiss/17298.html