Christian Quin Newell's painting, "Key," employs a muted color palette featuring blues, soft whites, and earth tones. Two figures in identical attire are depicted against a mystical landscape, one holding a lantern while the other touches a glowing orb embedded in a wall. The composition is rooted in Metaphysical Painting, with the figures demonstrating a surreal narrative and psychological depth. Through Newell's use of underpainting and natural pigments, the piece evokes a sense of timelessness and mystery, reflecting his exploration of mysticism and the merging of past and future. ...
Christian Quin Newell's work, which includes paintings, drawings, and miniatures, features coded narratives that reflect on the world around him. His practice blends his studies of mysticism, psychology and art history, and employs a unique iconography of symbols, archetypal images, historical characters, and multi-layered plots. He uses underpainting techniques and palettes from the Venetian Renaissance, as well as natural semi-precious pigments such as cinnabar and malachite, which are found in Indian miniature painting. With a mixed Jamaican and Italian heritage, he creates imagined worlds reminiscent of Metaphysical Painting, an early 20th-century Italian art movement, filled with enigmatic objects, where principles of time and space are distorted, featuring hybrid figures from a possible mythic past or imagined future. It is difficult for the viewer to place the scenes within a recognisable context, giving the impression that these images exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe.
...
