Artist, art director and designer David Bailey Ross (@galeriephantom) has recently taken interest in watercolors and through this latest creative endeavor he is testing how many ways there are to dismember the human head. With his “HEAD” series, the artist probes all the obsessions inhabiting the skull: fleshless flesh, these heads trace a new line of flight.

Hi David, I’m glad I finally had the chance to interview you because your work has always resonated with me. What sparked your interest in watercolor and which urgency led your first approach to this technique? Did the subject change over the course of time or was it there from the beginning as a sort of virtual object waiting for the right medium to appear?

Hello and thank you, It’s great to hear the works have resonated with you and I’m very happy to chat.

Painting and drawing is something I have always done but it wasn’t until 2019 that I made a conscious decision to take it more seriously as a practice. I rented a small studio and began experimenting with different mediums. Initially, what I was doing was purely abstract but quite quickly and somewhat subconsciously I started painting heads. I had used aquarelle before but hadn’t explored its full potential. With some promising initial results using a wet on wet technique I experimented with different types of paints and papers and through trial and error arrived at where I am now.
What I like about wet on wet watercolor painting is its unpredictable nature. The paint bleeds into the wet paper distorting and enhancing the marks you make. You have to work quickly encouraging the marks to settle where you want them as the water evaporates. It’s a bit of a collaboration with the forces of nature.

This has probably been noted a million times by now, but there is a massive resemblance to some of Bacon’s oeuvre. In his Logic of Sensation, Deleuze described Bacon as «a painter of heads, not of faces»: if the face is an organized space, a structure, the head is instead what the face conceals, an embodiment of animal traits. In particular, after the face has been dismantled, a zone of indiscernibility between man and animal can emerge. Not a similarity of forms, but rather a conjuring of intensities, these animal traits are «the deformations the body undergoes». First of all, did Francis Bacon influence your work? Secondly, I don’t want to draw conclusions about common intentions just because of similar aesthetic outputs, but do you share Bacon’s sentiment?

I am interested in using paint to create a tactile feeling of flux or abstraction, like a party blurred frozen moment. I think Francis Bacon had a fascination with film and photography or at least I know he often worked from photographs. Taking a photograph as reference and with paint and brush strokes, he adds a human element which creates something more resonant and expressive than I think a photograph can. Looking at his paintings in real life, you really appreciate the gestures and textures on the canvas yet the marks feel quite free and difficult to say exactly how they were applied.

The ideal result for my own work is that you can’t really see my hand or how the forms came about and I think Francis Bacon is a master of this. I suppose I share that sentiment in that I am interested in the idea of stripping away the facade and getting at what lies underneath.

A sort of fleshless flesh, your portraits seem to be also boneless. And yet, they look stiff and rigid, so what’s inside them? What is filling them up? What kind of obsessions or dreams do they contain?

I am not always trying to represent the surface, I like to create the impression of layers or sometimes a representation of a sensation that is happening inside the head. If we were to develop a device that could capture an image of how someone was feeling inside maybe it could look this way.

For many of your heads there is this blurred patina that makes them look as if there is a glass between them and the viewer: does our gaze need to be protected from these figures? Do we need to look at our obsessions through a screen?

I do want there to be a sense that this is a moment in time, some parts in and out of focus. Although the paintings do exist as physical objects they are primarily viewed through a mobile phone or device and I do think this plays a role in their creation. The silhouettes are very defined and clean with a semi photographic quality and maybe there is something disconcerting to some about that combination.

In some ways, your work reminds me of what the first version of AI diffusion models used to do to the human figure (which we might as well refer to as the “human dis-figure”): disjointed composition of facial features, missing elements, uncanny expressions. Any connection at play here?

It's not something I have knowingly referenced although I am interested in this sort of thing and a subconscious influence might be at work here.
I do like the idea of creating something that is both analog and new and feeding it back into the digital world via social media.

There is a recurring element in your heads which is the inclusion of BDSM gear, which is of course a way of pursuing that disfiguration of the face we discussed before, of making it unrecognizable and of transforming it into a silent device for artificial screams. I think many of your figures might be confused for a prosthesis: can wounds be inflicted to a prosthesis?

I am interested in exploring ways in which people use masks or jewelry as cultural identifiers or means of expression. BDSM masks are used to both hide the identity of the person wearing them but also to signal a particular role. They are perhaps more literal than some of the other heads but I want to keep my options open and have fun with what I am doing. I post the work as it progresses, often a new work every day. Each time I post a new one, another is archived leaving at the moment 36 works visible at any one time.

Do you envision yourself painting full body figures in the future?

I do have ambitions to expand on the work: bodies, figures or even situations. It’s possible my Instagram account (@galeriephantom) will remain dedicated to the HEAD series but I want to keep my options open. Right now I am just having fun creating and publishing the works on Instagram although If it were the right space I would love to display them in a physical gallery.