Style

ArtCrush: David Lock

A collage of men and masculinity.

Gaydar

16 Mar 2025 — 4 min read

We caught up with artist David Lock for a behind-the-scenes look at his collage creations.

How did you discover and start to explore your passion for art and painting?

It's always been there, since I was a child - I loved drawing my favourite pop stars and stuff.

I had an accident when I was 19, so I decided to go back to college and further my education. That's when I started to take art seriously.

I moved to London to do an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths in London in 2001 and I've been painting pretty much non stop since then.

Why is collage a medium that speaks to you?

I really like the reconstructive aspect of collage. It can give you control and ownership of a found image in a different way.

I love fashion magazines, but I originally treated them reverentially, so to tear them up was - for me - quite a liberating and destructive thing to do.

Collage can have many aspects, but one thing I think it can excel at is the way it evokes the uncanny. Just by putting together two unrelated images to create a third new thing, a hybrid, in that way it can be very playful.

Your work often centres the male body and is imbued with sexuality - was it a conscious decision to bring together your sexuality and your art or was that something that just evolved over time?

Yes, it evolved over time. With my love of fashion and men's style magazines, I've always been more drawn to mass media imagery than, say working from a life model in the studio.

As an artist I'm really interested in the notion of difference. I like mixing together the different male bodies I find in magazines or off the internet - there's the playful aspect to it but it also points to that idea of difference and otherness.

It's a cliche in gay culture that the idealised perfect body is highly prized, so by creating a different body a 'misfit', it asks questions about the bodies we inhabit.

To then work up my collages in paint, it's about making a painting which looks 'good' in another sense.

How can people best view or purchase your work?

I have been fortunate to do a couple of commissions. As a collagist to do a commission it helps to have lots of images at my disposal. I was commissioned by Barrie Drewitt-Barlow to make a painting of his eldest adult twins Saffron and Aspen. They are renowned as being Britain's first surrogate babies born to a same sex couple. This was a lot of fun as I just collaged loads of their instagram into a double portrait of them. It was a private commission but I then had the opportunity last year to show the portrait as a centrepiece to a solo show I had at Firstsite, Colchester. I made the painting in 2019, so it was great to have the opportunity to share it with the public.

Barrie was very generous and we collaborated on several more paintings for his collection.

I have a website where I can be contacted at David-Lock.com and I'm also on instagram @mrdavidlock

What do you hope that people feel when they're looking at the work you've created?

In a way, I'm a multimedia artist as I show large wall-based collages alongside my Misfit paintings. I also paint direct singular paintings of men which I call my 'Other' series, so in my recent exhibitions there's a lot of different works that also play around with scale. With that, there's a lot going on to unpack.

I hope viewers find the work thought-provoking and it asks them questions about men and masculinities.

Times are really uneasy and there's a lot of emphasis on social media influence and toxic masculinity amongst young men. For me however, I'm much more interested in seeing men's vulnerabilities in a positive open way, and expressing and allowing for that. I hope that comes through in the work.