Mark Enstone

After abandoning theology and working as a croupier, Mark Enstone had a long career as a professional photographer. He photographed everything from offshore oil rigs and nuclear power stations to rain soaked sports presenters and circus animals. Vastly preferring being in the warm, he latterly specialising in fashion and beauty for an array of international brands.

He was also the founder and creative director of ADORE Beauty magazine.

Enstone shares, “I thought these were simply paintings about fashion shoots, where strangers gather briefly but intensely. For half my life they were my world. However, I can also see they revolve around witnessing the facility of women to bond easily and share intimacy; qualities largely absent from male society. The paintings almost all start with a gesture, often of tenderness or vulnerability and the composition builds around that. I can’t articulate the emotional pull of those gestures but they are the crux of the paintings. As to the narrative or event, I know no more than the viewer; I deliberately avoid resolving the puzzle, preferring ambiguity and a sense of the off-centred.”

More from Mark Enstone at http://www.enstone.net