Christian Hook

At the heart of Christian's work is a fascination with time and motion. Rather than capturing the instant itself, he is interested in what happens around it — the transition from one position, expression or movement to another.

Recognisable forms can therefore appear fragmented, repeated or partially dissolved. Transparent layers of paint allow one image to pass through another, suggesting that we're seeing several moments simultaneously rather than a conventional frozen portrait.

It creates an intriguing tension. We recognise the person or animal immediately, yet the image refuses to remain still. The subject seems to exist somewhere between one moment and the next.

When Art Meets Science

Christian's fascination with how we perceive the world extends well beyond painting. Science, philosophy and ideas surrounding time, evolution and human perception have repeatedly found their way into his practice.

This curiosity has led him to collaborate with scientists and to develop bodies of work exploring subjects ranging from physics and the nature of time to evolution and adaptation.

In his Darwin works, horses become a vehicle for exploring those ideas. Anatomical forms emerge, disappear and reform across the image, allowing the animal to feel simultaneously recognisable and in a constant state of transformation.

These scientific ideas don't replace the traditions of painting. Christian deliberately brings the two worlds together, combining his appreciation of classical art with experimentation, abstraction and contemporary ways of understanding what we see.

Breaking the Image Apart

Up close, a Christian Hook painting reveals how deliberately that sense of movement is constructed.

Areas of precise figurative painting sit beside expressive marks, translucent colour and apparently unfinished passages. A face may emerge clearly from one section before dissolving into abstraction; the movement of a horse might be suggested through several overlapping positions rather than one defined outline.

The technique allows Christian to explore portraiture and equine subjects without simply reproducing their appearance. Instead, the painting becomes a record of movement, observation and change.

His 2014 win on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year brought Christian's distinctive approach to portraiture to a much wider audience, but the experimentation has continued to evolve through subsequent projects and bodies of work.

Christian doesn't paint a single moment. He explores what happens as one moment becomes the next.