If You Hit Anything Call It The Target!

About

Over the past decade, Thorne has been focussing on illustration and outdoor painting. Along side curating and participating in numerous group exhibitions Rich has been working as a creative and commercial illustrator for animation giants ‘Aardman’, the BBC, Golden Wolf and others.

In his new body of work, we see how this time spent exploring illustration through large scale murals, translates to canvas. This is the most direct translation from wall to canvas of his work, so far.

Most notably, with the introduction of a new process — an initial, digital drawing stage to perfect composition, prior to painting. A combination of solid fills with both paint brush and airbrush to mimic the effects from a spray can fill. A bold transition from wall to canvas, brings together the artist’s free-flowing abstract drawing, a combination of graffiti elements and forms, mixed with a love of comic book line work and shading.

This exhibition also brings together Thorne’s personal influences from the king of comics: Jack Kirby to arguably the king of comic book characters — ’Spider-Man’. The fictional human mutant is a regular in Thorne’s work, though often appearing defeated and down trodden, rarely the strong, dynamic superhero we all know.

Here, we see ’Spider-man’ portrayed primarily as a design element rather than a heroic figure — an aesthetic choice that serves as a combination of line weights contained perfectly within the human form.

We see other anonymous characters and unknown forms take shape throughout the canvas, buried and bound up in debris made of abstract forms, flowers and rocks. The artist abstracts central images by breaking their outline to build new structures and shapes flowing through and around them, emboldening them with a highly-saturated and vivid colour palette.

Illustrative drawing will always be the primary focus of Rich Thorne’s artistic career, manifested in the exploration of line-work and the pursuit of the perfectly balanced image. Rich believes the Comic book artists of the late 60’s and early 70’s achieved this perfectly and remains in search of that in this new portfolio of work and with them being a firm visual influence