Christian Marsh

Works
Overview

Christian Marsh is an urban landscape painter best known for his sprawling cityscapes of major destinations around the world.

 

Marsh has often been described as a "humane" hyperrealist as he adds narrative to the humans in his oil on canvas paintings, conveying genuine human emotion and concern rather than using them to simply clarify scale. His intention is to invite the viewer to speculate about each human's activity and to present a comprehensive record of a particular location at a particular time.

 

Marsh uses photography to document compositional features, lighting and moving objects at a given time, taking numerous images at the same location so that he can add or remove elements at will. This enables Marsh to create a composite view that reinvents his photographs into a scene that never existed.

A distinct sharpness from foreground to background is exhibited in Marsh's paintings. His description of light alters according to the seasons and the architectural influences of each city. His use of paint is similarly precise and consistent, with a meticulous technique that involves layering colour and information until reaching a pinnacle of extreme clarity.

 

The combination of capturing a city's unique beauty and the personalisation of his painting's characters results in work that is visually intoxicating.

Christian Marsh has been described as one of the most 'humane' (in the proper sense of the word) of all hyperrealist artists. For the people in his superb paintings are not impersonalized ant-like beings, who merely serve the technical purpose of clarifying scale; but in contrast, are based on and portray genuine human emotions and concerns. This narrative provokes questions from the viewer such as who are they, and what are they doing- and it ultimately enriches and adds vivacity to his work.

- John Russell Taylor, extract from Exactitude: Hyperrealistic Art Today

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