Jack Lloyd
Manchester based photographic collage artist Jack Lloyd has sold around 10,000 pieces of work in a career spanning the best part of 20 years. His iconic images of urban landscapes from Manchester, London, Paris, New York are on countless walls in homes across the city and, indeed, the world, from Canada to New Zealand, Dubai to Germany and beyond.
A completely freestyle digital artist whose work can include grim, stark and monochrome styles in one piece, yet, be full of vibrant colour, mystery and intrigue in the next.
Every time Jack explores a new environment with his digital camera he sees something new, something different, something that won’t just fire his imagination but, also the imaginations of all those who love his work.
His unique style began when he completed a degree in Technical Theatre at the University of Manchester which covered stage design, lighting and sound.
When, In his final year, Jack specialised in work involving the layering of sound and digital photography was just starting to surface and he used it for his degree to document the technical processes involved in sound production. It was at this pivotal moment that he realised he could layer the photos in a similar way to the sound.
Jack's Style
“Some artists have a unique selling point. For me, it’s an emotional selling point. My artwork is there to play with the mind, memories, spirit and perceptions.
“The photos are my palette made up of colours, shapes, patterns and textures. I’m always searching for something that’s epic.”
That epic quality is often brought out in the way Jack frames his artwork as he’s one of very few people in the country still developing traditional yet highly sustainable picture framing using age-old skills and natural products. Each frame takes three days to craft and every one comes with a lifetime warranty.
Jack’s wide-ranging style reflects his inspirations from David Hockney, Picasso, 1920s Bauhaus, the futurism movement and the mechanical movement through to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. Other influences include dada, pop art, cubism, collage and brutalism.
Jack says: “Nothing I do is contrived. With everything I do I’m thinking about colours, shapes, textures and how it will all fit together naturally. It’s not done until that final piece of digital photography is dropped in and there have been many times when I’ve done that, stood back, thought it didn’t work and scrapped it.
“At first sight the photos may look as though they’ve been thrown together. I can assure you that’s certainly not what’s happened. There’s certainly a natural order and structure to the chaos.”
Jack's Commissions
Jack’s commissions range from huge corporate artwork to images to celebrate weddings, anniversaries or to remember and represent an individual’s life.
Families will give Jack lots of photos and documents to work with … and the emotional impact when they first see what he’s done with them can be overwhelming.
He explains: “I’m looking for the photo – and it may even only be a small part of a photo – that is just them. It may be a look, a smile, just something that captures the spirit of who they were. These are emotional pieces of work but until people see them they may not have realised just how much emotion was in the photos they gave me.”
With his gallery work, the ethos of much Jack does is around the concept of ‘exhausted environment.’
City landscape is flawed, people are flawed, the world is flawed and these imperfections are captured in Jack’s work.
Jack says: “People looking at it will recognise parts of Manchester but in a way they’ve never seen it before. I’m trying to bring their subconscious alive and trigger something deep within them.”
There can be more than 100 photos in some of Jack’s artwork and with so much going on it can give an unsettling yet compulsive feeling that bits you recognise about the city are being played fast forward through your head.
As with all great art, it works on many different levels. Stand back from one of Jack’s pieces and it’s powerful in terms of colour and form. Step forward and you’ll see how much intricacy is in there with tiny photos you just don’t see from a distance. People who have had Jack’s artwork on their walls for years will still see something new, something they’ve not spotted before if they look close enough.
“It’s a nice picture when you step back but tells a story when you step forward,” says Jack. “If they know Manchester each picture will hold a story, a memory, something personal to them. My artwork isn’t a one-hit wonder. It’s multi-dimensional and there to keep drawing emotion out of the person looking at it.”
Jack has now been in his gallery, House of Bystander, on Beech Road, Chorlton, since 2005 and people come from across the city – and much further afield – to see and buy his work.
