Time Machine 3 2021

This painting by Joshua Flint, entitled 'Time Machine 3', is made with paint and a playful sense of colour. It’s all about process, about moving things around and seeing what happens. I love the thick brushstrokes here, how Flint makes no attempt to smooth or blend the tones of gray that set the scene. You can see the marks of the brush, the texture of the paint sitting right there on the surface. And then these pink bursts of flamingo pink, which are almost cartoonish! I particularly love the way one of the birds is cropped right at the top, like a memory cut short or incomplete. This feels totally deliberate. There’s a strange collision of different styles and perspectives happening, it’s like a deconstructed stage set. This is the same kind of image play you see in the paintings of David Hockney, where representation becomes a puzzle of perception. Flint plays with ambiguity, he doesn't give you all the answers, but invites you to find your own way in.