#36: Layers and Lines: Beginning a New Moiré Portrait Project

This week, something shifted in the studio. After months of painting for Holmfirth Artweek and letting those works live their life on the wall, I’ve started exploring something entirely new — and it feels like I might’ve found my thing.

For the first time in a while, I feel that spark again. Not just the satisfaction of making, but the tingle of experimentation, of potential. The kind of excitement that pulls you in and says, this could be it.

Portraits Through Patterns

At the heart of this new work is a technique that blends moiré patterns — those strange, wave-like optical effects — with portraiture. I’ve always been drawn to faces, but this time, I’m not just painting what I see. I’m layering perception, asking the viewer to look through something, to see the familiar distorted in unfamiliar ways.

Right now, it’s all in the early stages. I’m working by suspending a sheet of Perspex over a wooden panel canvas and testing how printed images behave when layered. Using Photoshop, I build up experiments: an A3 inkjet-printed portrait on paper paired with an A3 acetate overlay printed with fine line patterns. The interaction between the two creates that shimmering, almost animated moiré effect — alive, shifting, difficult to pin down.

And it’s fascinating.

The Excitement of Testing

There’s something liberating about working like this — not yet painting, just testing. Making and remaking, printing and overlaying, watching how the lines interact with the curves of a face, how expression warps through movement and light. It feels technical and intuitive all at once. Like solving a puzzle with no solution. Like learning a new language.

Every combination reveals something new — and with each, I feel closer to what I want this work to become.

A Step Toward Paint

Of course, this is all leading somewhere. The intention isn’t to stop with prints and Perspex — though I love what they can do. The goal is to translate these experiments into something slower, more tactile: oil paint.

Eventually, I want to take these image studies and paint them, preserving the visual interference in brushstrokes rather than transparencies. It’s a challenge I’m genuinely excited about — to make something that feels digital, optical, almost mechanical… but by hand.

To take something so precise and replicate it with all the imprecision that makes painting beautiful.

Finding a Way Forward

More than anything, this project feels like a new chapter. Not a break from what I’ve done before, but an evolution — an extension of my interest in faces, expression, and perception, pushed through a new lens. It’s early days. Nothing’s final. I’m still knee-deep in the mess of it. But I wanted to share it now, while it’s still fresh and uncertain and full of momentum.

Because this stage — the testing, the excitement, the “what if?” — is part of the art too.

.M.

Be real.

Make art.

If you’d like to learn more about my creative process or see my latest work, feel free to reach out or check out the rest of my website.