Josie McCoy

Josie McCoy is a prize-winning British artist who paints realist portraits of fictional characters from the world of film, television and music.

McCoy graduated from the MA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martin’s in 1999 and has exhibited widely since.

McCoy shares that she paints portraits of characters from the world of film and television.

”The subjects I choose are fictional but familiar within contemporary culture. I usually paint female characters in response to the way women have been represented throughout art history, where they have been the passive subject of art. In my paintings, I aim to present them as active protagonists with agency and power. I also want them to have a timeless, universal quality in the same way as the iconic stars of the silver screen.”

“I work from photographs taken from the film or television screen. My source material is mediated several times from the original: by photography, projection, photocopy and then painted. The viewer is presented with a split second, transformed and suspended in paint.”

McCoy’s paintings are included in private and public collections, she has exhibited widely and her paintings have been selected four times for the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery and she was shortlisted for the Castellon International Painting Prize and the PS Mirabel Painting Prize. She received a Woo Charitable Foundation Arts Bursary and won the Centre of Attention Painting Prize.

More from Josie McCoy on her website at https://josiemccoy.co.uk/