Born in 1945, Lancaster. He lives and works in London.

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In appropriating painting's history as a contemporary resource, what precisely is being referenced? My own occasional co-option ranges from the Italian Renaissance (Giulio Romano) through Seventeenth Century France (Georges de la Tour) to Twentieth Century America (Edward Hopper) and the present day (Alan Chartlton).
In each case, a aspecific iconography is a pre-requisite for the choice of image, providing a suitable reciprocity with my own subject and my own picture construction. Without this "match", the incorporation or transcription would not be made. However, once it is, two implications present themselves. One is as acknowledgement of the influence of a rich stockpile of imagery (allegories; histories; portraits; landscapes; etc) still available to us in museums and in reproduction, and perhaps just as much in our minds as more recently originated material.
The other is an admiration for the vividness of depiction, and an unavoidable awareness of the medium itself as a continuous physical presence (a quality of which photography, with its inherent emphasis on other times and other places, might justifiably be jealous). Nevertheless, such "homage" is more likely to be articulated as a decipherable component within the ensuing image  rather than as a tangible element of the object in which that image now resides, and the original painting is likely to be cited as only one aspect of an hybrid which, while constituted as photography in this case, may also reference cinema, commercial art, or any other part on an extended two-dimensional visual field which negotiates past and present and has one eye on the future.

J. H.