Artworks by Samuel Honey

Drawing upon a hearty blend of symbolism, surrealism, and a touch of the northern renaissance, my practice as a figurative expressionist painter is steeped in a love of storytelling, poetry, literature, and critical theory. I think of my paintings like visual poems that use space, presence, absence, rhythm, and texture to create links that open up rather than foreclose meaning. The work encourages viewership as participation in meaning-making and reflects on its role as both ritual practice and as a tool for navigating our multi-polar world.

I work in a deconstructive and Frankensteinian way, collaging shades of El Greco and Bruegel, with Otto Dix, Leonora Carrington, and Lucian Freud. In cutting across historical and cultural reference points, my work asks that we reflect on how personal and social context shapes our interpretations of the visual-narrative world.

I am thematically interested in mythmaking, and the interplay between physical embodiment and unconscious immaterialism. This can take the form of re-contextualising Hellenistic stories to create uncanny parables about the modern world, while seeking to foreground how objects and experiences move and exist across psychical and physical realms.