about
Allan creates artwork that engages the viewer at different levels: visual, emotional and lingustic. His work is figurative, highly detailed and features illusionism or “trompe l’oeil” effects. Many of his pictures could be termed “surreal” – particularly the ones that develop from chance arrangement of images or those which are suggested by forms created by blowing ink across a sheet of paper. The puns in the titles reflect the deliberate visual ambiguity of the images.
Some of his recent fine art works were based on scanning some blown ink forms into a computer, digitally altering them and then creating landscapes around them. This marriage of new technology and traditional painting resulted in a series of virtual landscapes, the Spacial Branch series, produced initially as digital prints and later as oil paintings.