Alan Kestner

I have always been a creative person. In childhood I liked making things in wood. The weekly order of fruit and vegetables came in a wooden orange box. I would use the planks to construct everything my imagination dreamt up, including chairs and tables, swords and cricket bats, tree houses and, most importantly, boats. I was a choral scholar at New College School in Oxford and this instilled in me a lifelong love of music, so that now it is one of the main themes of my painting. I try to evoke the feeling that it instills in me through the use of pattern, shape and colour.

My secondary school did not take art seriously and, as I was good at other subjects, I had to drop art. Instead, I studied sciences and went on to take Physics at university. I studied this for one year, and then changed courses to study Fine Art at the University of Newcasle-upon-Tyne. I developed an interest in French modern primitive painters such as Camille Bombois and René Rimbert and wrote my history of art dissertation on the Douanier Rousseau.

Much of my work involves the bright colours and optimistic outlook of naïf art, but I also go further and unsettle the viewer by including more sinister vignettes in my compositions. Peaceful landscapes abruptly become anarchic – for example, in the “Garden of Mirthly Delights” there are mouths ready to swallow up unwary oarswomen; snails fire incendiaries into a city; and the citizens escape only to find they need to dance to escape the boiling-hot sand. But, above all, I like to pull the rug from under unwary feet and hopefully make people think more deeply about the world around us.