Nathan Eastwood

Artist statement

 I was brought up in a Christian (evangelical) home where one had to accept the teachings of the bible as gospel; questioning the faith was prohibited. This negativity did it violence; they limited philosophical dialectics. I am now consistently self-reflexive on what I think about these things and life in general. It is this un-questioning that encourages me to question my own ontological relation to certain truth procedures. It is this self-reflexivity and criticality that has navigated me into making art (painting); the reading of philosophy and politics. 

Central to my practice is a re-examination of social realism as a part of contemporary practise.  My paintings are concerned with the examination and revealing of real life, working class life, an ordinary everyday experience of the world and one’s process mundane issues; from shopping to politics. The paintings have become allegorical of working class life. What is the working class today? Who is the working class? What do they look like? Through painting I scrutinise particular aspects of working class life via the photographic image; from this scrutiny I intend on locating a specific sign that reveals a truth procedure inherent within the photo-print.