Artist research- Wyatt Mills

Wyatt Mills is an artist currently based out of Brooklyn, New York who creates oil on canvas paintings that straddles the line between abstract and surrealist art. Mills originally hails from Mt. Kisco, New York, but was raised in Los Angeles, California.

I have chosen to include Wyatt Mills in my artist research because I think his ideas could help me develop my own. Wyatt uses the structure of a figure or portrait, sometimes multiple in one painting. His paintings are also visually very intense and chaotic, yet they are still able to communicate ideas about the mind. 

My work involves ideas about the mind and how someone could change their environment away from their everyday life surrounded by people and consumerism. I am also interested in Mill's way of using portraiture and how it's an opportunity for play, and I've noted that he's explained how the structure of a portrait or figure draws the viewer straight to it, as traditionally it is the central subject. 

This has made me realise that using portraiture in my own work will draw the viewer towards it, so I need to be conscious of how I want the portrait to present the subject matter I am exploring and how I want the work to be read.     





'With a unique painting style that embraces chaos, Wyatt’s work invites us into an alien world of raw emotion where the darker side of the human psyche is revealed. His distorted portraiture demonstrates a subtle fusion of abstract and classical style. After having studied traditional oil painting as a teenager, and graduating with a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts, Wyatt chose to find a way to paint that which is right behind the mask of ‘normal.’ Through his art he hopes to expand a private debate about social boundaries people may find hideous, captivating, offensive or attractive.'

I enjoy Wyatt's work as it is visually chaotic. Wyatt's painting style is abstract yet still uses traditional painting techniques, both styles makes the work visually strong yet still with room to play with colour texture and composition. 

'You work almost exclusively in portraiture, even if much of it is more abstract than figurative. What is it about this domain that interests you?

Portraiture is a great sandbox for me to play in. By using the structure of a portrait, the viewer is imminently doomed to see an individual or person. This enables me to experiment with the capabilities that paint has in terms of portraying a perception—playing with the moods of color, texture, and seeded moments of definition. I find myself taking little bits and pieces of different people or photographs and piling them on top of one another until a new persona forms and grows itself. The previous layers flicker through the final image like a backlight, and in this way for me it resembles the memories and past versions of ourselves that we carry on our shoulders in the present.'

A portrait doesn't always have to be fully completed, parts of portraits can be experimented with, this takes away from the portrait having to be seen as a present person and offers more to the painting.Wyatt shows a way of playing with painting, with elements of traditional painting techniques and remaining structures of a figure or portrait, yet abstracted and swapped and layered.