Dominic Shepherd’s painting technique has been described as “psychedelic, acid-tab styling.” His settings are ambiguous, often set in forests, an ethereal, folklore vision of England that might be past, present, or future. His work examines myth-making, magic, and alternative narratives. His paintings depict real scenes, but they also resonate on an emotional register of art, history, mythology, religion, and literature, speaking to dreams, memory and intimate lives, particularly family life.

As scholar Gavin Parkinson writes:

“The medium of water has offered an immense fund of symbolism to writers and artists due partly to its highly suggestive, threefold register of depth, surface and reflection (of ourselves, the sky and so on). As well as its promise of a latent, concealed world…water manifests our own terrain in a mirror image. In this sense, the artist paints what is already a representation, carried on the surface of the lake. Water also draws swimmers…to a world familiar to birds and fish, one fully of three dimensions rather than the limited three, which is more like two, that we humans normally inhabit, fixed as we are for the most part to the two dimensions of the Earth’s surface. This is the property of water and our relationship with it that lends itself so powerfully to dreams, stirring the unconscious profoundly.

Not much of this crossed the minds of pioneering modernists Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir when they invented Impressionism through studies of water, carried out at the floating restaurant and bathing place La Grenouillère west of Paris late in 1869. It is unlikely that Renoir ever thought in such terms. However, the decisive paintings of Monet and Paul Cézanne in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have been reassessed in recent years as less a project furthered by positivism and to do with the manipulation of materials on a flat surface than a project against the disenchantment brought on by modernity. In this interpretation, magic, prophecy and dream take precedence. Monet’s water lilies, especially the large canvases of 1914-18 at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, shod of perspective or any other conventional optical entry, assume a cosmic significance. Likewise, the early twentieth century bather paintings of Cézanne and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner are, respectively, oneiric and ritualistic, imagining a reversal of the clock of progress to a dreamtime of utopia, collectivity and natural healing. Beyond these, there is an entire canon of modernist pictures extending from the late nineteenth century up to the 1920s of which Shepherd is perfectly aware – of bathers, of women at the source, of women and men immersed in streams, rivers and baths – that whisper their presence behind paintings such as [the present work, Witch Wood].”

Shepherd received his BA (hons) and MA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. He is an associate professor with the Arts University Bournemouth and has shown internationally in London, Frankfurt, Munich, and Miami. His work is held in private collections globally in Private Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.