Colin McMaster takes idealised images from society and turns them against themselves. Deploying caricature and cartoon-like visual reductionism, his works are not portraits of individual people but amplified, two-dimensional identity templates of social stereotypes.

McMaster exaggerates these ‘types’: the blonde bombshell, the middle-aged housewife, by displaying his painting’s subjects ‘like cardboard cut-outs’, flat in nature and subtle in colour, often against a monochrome back ground.

In his latest series of paintings, sophisticated women, who appear to be French and of a certain class from the works’ titles, gaze seductively, yet somewhat vacantly, from the canvas, perhaps suggesting the tedious lifestyle of a…

Colin McMaster takes idealised images from society and turns them against themselves. Deploying caricature and cartoon-like visual reductionism, his works are not portraits of individual people but amplified, two-dimensional identity templates of social stereotypes.

McMaster exaggerates these ‘types’: the blonde bombshell, the middle-aged housewife, by displaying his painting’s subjects ‘like cardboard cut-outs’, flat in nature and subtle in colour, often against a monochrome back ground.

In his latest series of paintings, sophisticated women, who appear to be French and of a certain class from the works’ titles, gaze seductively, yet somewhat vacantly, from the canvas, perhaps suggesting the tedious lifestyle of a wealthy middle-class housewife.

As well as Marvel comics, other influences claimed by McMaster include Japanese anime, magazine photographs, advertisements, erotic playing cards, 19th century European painting as well as ‘bad’ anti-modernist illustrative painting like Norman Rockwell.

McMaster is a graduate of Central St Martin’s college in London. Whilst still a student he won an award for his work as part of the Royal Ulster Academy Competition in his native Belfast.

As well as exhibiting at the Ulster Museum, he has shown work in Bangor and widely in London where he resides.