Ben Ashton
Portraits Without Limits
“Hyperrealism, or soul catching, as I like to refer to it, has always blown me away. The idea that you can mimic the third dimension with a flat surface and take it a step farther and create an identity with it is something that one almost seems to be cursed with.”
Ben Ashton is a London-based visual artist who specializes in hyperrealistic portraiture and ambitious, immersive installation works. He combines precision in execution with humor and character, creating pieces that evoke an emotive response while also having a strong contextual foundation.
Growing up in an artistic household, with his father being an artist and his mother an art teacher, Ashton was surrounded by art from a young age. He was influenced by historical figurative painters and the Dutch masters, and originally focused on performance art. However, he became enamored with the gradual learning process of painting and taught himself through trial and error, standing in front of paintings in museums for hours and studying layering techniques from books and scriptures written in the 1600s. This self-taught approach has led to the development of his own unique style.
His recent collection, "To Our Glorious Future," is inspired by the Regency era and the birth of the British Empire. This period of time saw a proliferation of self-congratulatory portraiture, which Ashton subverts and disrupts in his paintings. The collection is a metaphor for a distorted picture of greatness, in which Britain's obsession with its own history and influence often leads to an idealized self-perception that overlooks its various misdemeanors. Ashton's work is a commentary on the themes of power, history, and representation.
Ashton's work has been recognized with numerous awards and has been exhibited worldwide. He is known for constantly experimenting and pushing the boundaries of painting and portraiture, and his work is marked by its originality and creativity.
