I have been making music since an early age, starting with classical piano and then moving on to guitar.I played in a number of bands before setting up my own studio and I have now produced five albums under the pseudonym of Electricity Bill 0ver the course of my career. My influences are eclectic, ranging from early 70s rock to American west-coast bands such as The Doors, Love, and Beefheart to Roxy Music, Radiohead and Bob Dylan. After leaving school and obtaining a degree in Maths and Physics from Sussex University and a successful career in IT, in 2008 I decided to revive my academic career and further my interest in art by taking a BA in Fine Art at Reading University, graduating with a first-class honours degree, focusing on oil painting with some installation work. I then went on to study for a Masters in Fine Art, graduating with distinction. I have had a lifelong interest in photography. Examples of my music, paintings and photographs can be found on my web site bobgeal.com.

My practice now is predominantly painting based. I paint because I have been seduced by the sensual physicality of the medium, its history and its possibilities, and I sometimes place my paintings in installations in order to explore how the dialogue between the two forms may inform and complement the work.

My recent work uses film stills combined with my own photographs as a basis for my paintings, using digital manipulation to experiment with form, colour and meaning. This work explores the uncertainty of identity, and film stills seem well suited to this end, as their removal from the film’s narrative structure, and my further erasure of key elements, invite viewers to construct their own meanings.

My ideas on uncertainty have been informed by a lifelong interest in Quantum Mechanics, and its implications for the uncertainty of reality. I am also interested in the uncertainty of artistic identity and how such an identity is constructed, having been influenced by the psychoanalytic idea that the self is predicated upon the other; the other in the case of the artistic self being the artist’s works and the response to them. If the artistic self is created through the other, it also appears as, and in, the other. This also raises the question of where the artist is located within his practice, where the frame is the studio, the critical discourse, the social and the institution.

Not wishing to be confined to any location or particular style or genre, I have been inspired by the work of Gerhard Richter and Philip Guston, whose willingness to make radical shifts in their work resulted in great diversity and a deep exploration of the artistic self. I would like my work to dislodge the viewer towards some degree of uncertainty.

Of course what my alter ego would really like  is to be admired, adored, adulated, worshipped, stroked,  licked, sucked, caressed, salivated over, drowning in juices, slapped, squeezed, whipped, sticky with worship, a surrealist’s fantasy, the critics’ dangerous pet, in the vanguard and the guard’s van, my mind as sharp as a Samurai laser, as magnetic as the Earth’s molten core, and twice as hot.

Sadly this is extremely unlikely to happen.