The artist

A studio built on
looking twice.

I paint places and people that stay with me — sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange, usually somewhere in between.

Justin Haze works from a converted garage on the edge of the coast, surrounded by canvases that are never quite finished and notebooks that are never quite organised. He trained as a sign painter before turning to oils, which explains the lettering, the flat planes of colour, and the suspicion of anything too precious.

The work moves between two obsessions: the anatomy of a place — how a village stacks itself against a mountain, how a shack holds itself up with signage and stubbornness — and the human face in the half-second before it reveals something.

I am not interested in making a picture of a place. I am interested in making the feeling of having been there.

How a painting happens

Each work begins on location with drawings, bad photographs and a list of things worth remembering. Back in the studio those notes become small colour studies, then a ground, then a fight. Most paintings take between two weeks and two months. A few take years, and get painted over.

He exhibits rarely, sells mostly through the studio, and answers his own email. Commissions are open to collectors, interior designers and hospitality spaces that want a painting with a memory attached.