James Hance

"James Hance is a relentlessly cheerful painter with a superb eye for celebrity portraits, a twisted view on TV and movie fuelled contemporary culture, and a passion for Star Wars. What more could you ask for? Don't go looking for deep meaning and conceptual theory in Hance's paintings, it just ain't there, and it doesn't need to be. James is probably one of those people you'd meet at a party who started off the life and soul but ends up taking it too far by dancing on the kitchen table or kicking a football through the window.

He's definitely a big kid at heart, you can tell, his infectious sense of humour parades triumphantly through an impressive collection of paintings depicting everything from The Muppets to Disney, silent movie heroes Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, to dodgy films like Bowie's Labyrinth and Little Shop of Horrors. A wealth of celebrities including Michael Jackson, Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg. Plus of course a wide variety of Star Wars influenced art. This is Pop, there are no two ways about it, but it's fun through and through, with little political or social comment to go on, James Hance's art is more a warts and all celebration of our mixed up, messed up starry-eyed of our ever accelerating multi-media culture."

"James appears to have three styles of painting, extremely expressive such as in one of a few depictions of Heath Ledger in the role of Joker, highly painterly in pieces such as his Starwars influenced tribute to the classic Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest and photorealistic "digitally enhanced" paintings such as The Gentle Sith. There are plenty of in-jokes in Hance's portfolio, and it does, from time to time, veer close to socio-cultural comment such as his hauntingly disturbing piece entitled 'Music and Me'."

"Jim's Pop Art sensibility is as rich as any of the movement's progenitors, vast areas of bold and bright colours, clear and crisp subjects, bold composition, and a humorous sense of rebellion that holds his work apart from traditionalists and various rather more supine celebrity painters. However I'm intrigued by his darker and more expressive paintings, quietly and calmly brooding without any fixed context other than familiarity to get one's cerebral teeth into. The fact is that his work is both populist and highly decorative, yet underneath there lurks primal fears and instincts lavished in a glossy camouflage that makes them all the more enticing."