Alex Buxton
‘The Layered Sketch’
May 2025
Figure 1 - 'The Council of Birds'
My paintings show surreal, disruptive worlds. Executed in oils, they are large-scale canvases, of figurative details and stylisations. I connect my work to a tradition in historic world-building, particularly the dramatic landscapes of Bosch and Bruegel, but my paintings only use this as a citation, bending their foundations into subversive, disorienting shapes.
My pictures prefer expressionism over renaissance attention to detail. I focus on materiality over subject and narratives. This is helped by my way of composing. I work not from a final plan in my head, but from small, preliminary sketches. On the canvas, I draw them in, layering up sketches, testing out what works and developing it over time. The layered sketches bring up lots of surprises, including figures of different scales, distorted perspective, and contrasting styles and finishes.
My first attempt at layering sketches was ‘The Council of Birds’ (Figure 1). Even though it was a large canvas (I made it to 118 x 152cm), it seemed I was still drawing on the same scale as for smaller works, because the details were so vast and refined. I find the composition was overwhelmed by too many different scenes happening at once; action bombarding you across the entire frame. There is no clear focal point (except the illustrative cyclops self-portrait), yet it seems oddly traditional. I find it reminiscent of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ (Figure 2), which carefully stages minute detail very precisely, however I find my most affective pictures are the ones which recycled these ideas to challenge world-building conventions.
Figure 2 - 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Bosch
‘The Joy of Painting’ is a more confident exercise in this practice. An anonymous man looks out before four worlds (a skeleton, a landscape, a drinker, a witch – Figure 3). The images were painted in from spaces left blank in the composition, and are sourced from four quite different places. My source imagery is heavily inspired by art history, and stems mostly from artist books. Here, Bruegel’s Death taking revenge on the living sits next to a chocolate box landscape – a surreal juxtaposition made possible from the layered sketch technique.
Figure 3 - 'The Joy of Painting'
The unconventionality of layered sketches is related to the contemporary German painters Jorg Immendorff and Neo Rauch. One can see how scattered sketching references are across the canvas, with very open planning, distorted scale and perspective. In Rauch’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (Figure 4), part of the plaza wall disconnects from the rest of the building. It seems this was originally sketched in as an open shape, cutting the composition in half, but painted into the building later. I like this idea of using open sketches to build form, and coming back to spaces left blank at the end, when inspiration strikes. I have done this in parts of all of my paintings. They either create a strange illusion of depth – such as the nocturnal street-view impasto in ‘Meanwhile the City Dreams’ – or accentuate flatness – the dab of blue in ‘Pissing Farm’, the Rothko colours in ‘The Ship’ (Figure 5).
Figure 4 - 'Waiting for the Barbarians' by Rauch
Figure 5
And whilst Immendorff and Rauch relate their vast, disjointed source material to historical or contemporary politics, my paintings evade these ‘grand message’ principles. I refrain from didactic narratives or strong connotations, instead allowing for various types of interpretation to be inflicted on them. I prioritise materiality over storylines, catching attention to the subtly different textures or the ways certain figures are painted. Of course, juxtapositions (even random ones) can be problematic. Sometimes Rauch conjures socialist realist atmospheres, which my work stands acutely aware of. My paintings offer a more bastardised, cut-off, anonymous rendition of art-historical world-building. It has mostly been used as a tool for utopic visions, but I use it to disrupt. Layered sketches steal the foundations painted in by art history, and break them apart, “providing views not of our world and messages which don’t make sense.”[1]
[1] See Buxton, A., artist statement dec 24.pdf
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