Cam Cross:
My artistic life in the studio – as a painter – is challenging. A lifelong fascination with early 20th century figures drives my creation. Chaplin to Hitler, Frankenstein to Macarthur, Mao Zedong to Fatty Arbuckle. I wonder what these people had in common – was it power? What is it charisma?…In fact, what do any of us have in common? Commonalities and differences are equal among us. Place two people together, any two people, and you have endless debate.

I find the optics of this period of history equally as fascinating. We see these people in black and white, devoid of warmth, passion and emotion, the stuff that only colour can bring.

We tend to look at these figures of history through unique eyes. These are not characters from colour photos, or colour images from paintings. These are people from a period of just over 100 years where images were brought to us in black and white photography. What happens to our sensibilities when we look at people from the ‘black and white’ era? It is with black and white that I create these paintings.

Black and white is the extreme version of who we are. Right and wrong, left and right, good and evil, truth and lie…It’s all there for us to examine when I paint
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