Christopher Hall

As in my artist statement, my primary reason for all these works is to make my audience smile. This might seem a frivolous or even flippant reason to create, but to me it's important and valuable. Normally I don't talk about what a painting 'means'. I do genuinely believe that meaning is personal to the viewer, not dictated by the artist. But my inspiration was as follows. Since the humour is foreground, the animal pun titles often come first and define what animal will be used in the painting. Often I'll laugh at the title, write it down and then mull over what I might do with it, for quite some time. "MooHair" sounds like the Spanish "Mujer" meaning "Woman". I took daVinci's "Maddona Litta" as inspiration for this one. Behind what I hope is initially an amusing parody of that work, showing a cow with fabulous hair; I wanted to depict a busy woman, juggling life, and present this in a beautiful way. "ManBooby" is ostensibly a slob of a man with 'moobs'. The blue-footed booby is a sea bird and looks naturally quite funny so this was a great pairing for me. This one started as usual, humour first, but did develop something of a narrative whilst working on it. "ManDrill" is an example of just pure frivolity. I was just amused by the idea of a big burly mandrill monkey holding his drill in a James Bond gun pose. It was a deliberate choice to juxtapose him with a bright pink background and reference the monkey's habitat in his shirt.