Trevor Guthrie

Trevor Guthrie appropriates images from history and popular culture, ranging from billboards to Hitchcock films, in the creation of large-scale, monochromatic charcoal drawings. “Appropriation for me is a subtle business,” he explains, “[…] There is a certain aesthetic that I am searching for; the oddball that lends itself to be exploited in my medium.” Guthrie draws with painstaking photorealistic detail, a nod to his source materials from films and photographs—the iconic Bates Motel from Psycho, or a flashy Las Vegas marquis, for example. He cites the working methods of Francis Bacon, particularly his appropriations from the seminal Russian film Battleship Potemkin, as a major influence, one that forced him to recognize cinema as “an omnipresent art-form, which invariably has a broad reaching influence.”