Colin McMaster

Colin McMaster paints stereotypes rather than individuals, meshing references from the photographic storyboards of romantic comics and their heightened sense of melodrama, with the more sinister undertones of American film noir and pulp crime novels.

The subjects Colin McMaster creates are superficially attractive but there is an underlying sense of their narcissism and perhaps even their engagement in acts which the viewer is compelled to interpret as illicit. As a result, the viewer is cast as a voyeur, the perception of what’s taking place in the paintings suspended in a double take, in an ambivalence between observation and accusation.

Stylistically, the work owes much to the Pop Art movement. The smoothness of the picture surface and the mannequin-like quality of the figures heightens the feeling of artifice and blurs our sense of looking at a painted image.

Colin McMaster works on panels and wood veneer, framed in linen – a reversal of the traditional materials used.

Colin McMaster is a Central St. Martins graduate and has exhibited widely including in London, New York, Miami, Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester and at the Royal Ulster Academy, Ulster Museum where he was the Winner of the Royal Ulster Academy 1999 Student Prize.