Josie McCoy
‘Poly Styrene’ oil on canvas, 40x40cm, 2017.
JOSIE McCOY graduated from the MA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martin’s in 1999 and has exhibited widely since then. Her paintings are included in private and public collections including the BBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Collection of University of Wales, the Jeremy Mogford Collection, the Borchard Collection of British Self-Portraits in the 20th Century and the Ofelia Martín & Javier Núñez Collection. Her work has been selected four times for the BP Portrait Award
at the National Portrait Gallery and she was shortlisted for the Castellon International Painting Prize. She received a Woo Charitable Foundation Arts Bursary and won the Centre of Attention Painting Prize. She was recently selected for the PS Mirabel Painting Prize. The works shown here are from her most recent series of paintings depicting musicians who significantly influenced her during her formative years.
“So far I’ve painted Debbie Harry, Bjork, Poly Styrene, Kate Bush, Madonna, Annie Lennox and Siouxsie Sioux and I plan to do more. In all my work, I am interested in how a viewer connects with a portrait, particularly how s/he engages with a familiar face when it’s seen out of context. I aim to create a dialogue between the gaze of the painting and the viewer. The paintings also interact
with each other when seen collectively. For the series, I looked for images to work from that showed the essence of how I remember the subjects, and I tried to capture some of their intensity which had such a positive effect on me when I was young. I was also interested in the idea of painting something which is considered a low art form using a traditionally high one”.