Paul Kilsby

(British, born 1953)

The Balance, from 'After Vermeer', 2006

Footnotes

Paul Kilsby is fascinated by the relationship between photography and painting. Having worked with renowned platinum printers Paul and Max Caffell, he is adept at exploiting the painterly quality of platinum-palladium printing and the way in which, by painting emulsion onto watercolour paper, one can produce photographs with an extraordinary luminosity and richness of tone.

After Vermeer revisits paintings by the 17th Century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. The artist famously used a camera obscura to study his subjects almost two centuries before the conventional date given for the 'birth' of photography and this, according to Kilsby, endows his paintings with a unique optical quality. Kilsby explores this photographic quality by composing new versions of Vermeer's images, swapping figures between scenes, experimenting with focus and optical interruption, and playing with the uncanny visual immediacy of Vermeer's portraits.

Paul Kilsby has exhibited in group and solo shows across the UK and in New York, Russia and Bulgaria, among others. His work is held in private and public collection worldwide and, notably, several of his photographs are housed in the permanent collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. He has written extensively on photography and has published a collection of his work, The Seer & The Seen (1995).