Keren Hitchcock

Painting came to me later in life. I returned to education for my master’s degree course some years after graduating and practising photography. I was required to take some additional art courses for my specialty so I chose sculpture and painting - the two areas that hadn’t come as naturally to me. I’d always sought to challenge the viewer with my photography exhibitions. Then I learned that we wouldn't know many sculptures existed without photography. So I created sculptures that couldn’t exist without the photo. 

So then how could I make painting not feel like painting? I applied my scientific approach and thought about the colours in the light spectrum. I asked myself, “how can I paint light? How could I paint as a photographer?”  

I learned about Trompe L’oeil painting and tricking the eye. What if the painting wasn’t a painting? What if my painting hid something? What if my painting looked like a sculpture? How could I paint like a photographer; can I paint the way light behaves? What if I made a white painting by using all of the colours? Nothing quite took, but this one got me the closest. 

Once again displaced and uprooted, I returned to painting in 2025 in search of myself. I took a local class and quickly fell in love with the immediacy of impasto painting—the contrast between smooth passages and thick ridges of paint. Building up layers of caked pigment that cast shadows across the surface, I finally found the sculptural element that had been missing from my work. Inspired by a recent holiday in Menorca, I began creating bird’s-eye view studies of people at the beach. Looking at the world from above brings me clarity; it grounds my perspective and helps scale my anxieties.