The work is figurative, raw and heavily layered. He is self-taught and works from a home studio near Manchester. His themes are identity, mental health and the human experience in its less comfortable forms. When asked about his process, he said: "I don't know what I'm doing." The paintings disagree.
Original works and signed limited edition prints are available below.
About Joseph Gilgun
Joseph Gilgun grew up in working-class Chorley, Lancashire, in post-industrial towns that rarely feature in conversations about art or culture. He briefly studied fashion as a young man before acting took over.
Most people know him as Woody in Shane Meadows' This Is England, though the roles kept coming: Rudy in Misfits, Cassidy in Preacher, and Vinnie in Brassic, the Sky Max series he co-created. His acting work earned him four BAFTA nominations along the way; a credit to his talent and passion for the art of performance.
None of which is to say it was easy. The entertainment industry asks a lot, and over time the anxiety and relentlessness of it pushed Gilgun towards something quieter. He started painting as therapy, with no audience in mind and no particular ambition attached to it. It became a hobby, and then something closer to a compulsion.
Joseph Gilgun's painting process and materials
Gilgun works primarily in acrylic on canvas, often incorporating spray paint and charcoal within the same piece. Beyond that, the materials expand to include whatever is available: tea, spit, and surfaces other than canvas entirely. Works have been painted on bed sheets during periods of severe anxiety, when leaving the house was not possible. Broken gates salvaged from wasteland near filming locations have also entered the collection.
The materials are not a stylistic affectation but the natural result of a practice that is process-driven above all else; one that has never been shaped by expectations of what art is supposed to look like.
The paintings are figurative but distorted: fractured faces, compressed figures, self-portraits worked over and reworked, and texture built up across the surface in layers.
The work rewards closer inspection. From a distance, a painting can read as a few striking faces and a tangle of abstract marks. Look longer and other faces emerge: petrified, despairing, looking away; and the marks resolve into hundreds of individual thoughts scratched into the surface. The effect is unsettling, and for those who appreciate Gilgun's work, often uniquely resonant in ways they recognise from their own lives.
Themes in Joseph Gilgun's work
The paintings deal with identity, mental health, class and the people society tends to make invisible. Gilgun has talked about finding a kind of beauty in very dark places, and that tension sits at the centre of most of the work.
Joe Gilgun has been open about living with bipolar disorder, ADHD, dyslexia and depression. The paintings do not depict these things so much as they come directly out of them; the layered surfaces, the simultaneous emotions, the noise underneath the legible.
Joseph Gilgun's influences
Gilgun has deliberately avoided studying other artists too closely, wanting to develop his own voice first; but, naturally, some influence is unavoidable.
George Condo paints portraits of what he calls ordinary people, a label Gilgun rejects because he does not believe anyone is ordinary. What draws him to Condo's work is the way it holds the chaos of human experience within a single face. The influence is visible in Gilgun's own work; in the fractured, distorted faces, and vivid depictions of overwhelm, despair, and multiple co-existent feelings and points in time in one image.
Francisco Goya's Black Paintings are a clear influence. Goya painted that series privately, kept the works inside his own home, and appeared to believe they might never be seen. Gilgun has described a similar discomfort about his own practice, a sense that the work was only ever meant to stay within the safety of his home. Some can draw parallels to Gilgun in the uncomfortable despondency and warped visual perspectives found in Goya's work.
Francis Bacon comes up often in Gilgun's discussions of his influences. The thematic overlap is hard to ignore: both painters approach the human figure without sentiment, and both are interested in despair without softening it. The overlap shows in the smearing techniques, facial contortions, and an evocation of the dark parts of the mind. Both artists' works are not so much about what you can see in the painting but about what seeing the painting makes you feel.
George Rowlett is a less obvious influence Gilgun has spoken of. Gilgun admires George Rowlett's craft and physical commitment, particularly the impasto approach: the weight and labour of building up a surface. He says Rowlett's self-portraits have especially influenced him, which is indeed where the influence shows most clearly.
Charles Bukowski and Rudyard Kipling are literary influences whose words appear directly in recent paintings, scratched into the compositions alongside the figures. Both writers shared Gilgun's interest in hard lives and difficult subjects, with Bukowski writing about working-class American despair, and Kipling about stoic soldiers and outsiders. Their words form part of the paintings, written and scratched into the surface to add linguistic texture to the visual atmosphere of the image.
Buy Joseph Gilgun art at Art of Protest Gallery
Art of Protest Gallery in York represents Joseph Gilgun, with original paintings and signed limited edition prints available to buy online or in person.
Joseph Gilgun originals are acrylic on canvas, often layered with spray paint, charcoal and mixed media. They range from smaller intimate pieces to large-format paintings over a metre across. Joseph Gilgun prints are signed, limited edition and available framed or unframed.
You can buy Joseph Gilgun art online here or visit us in person at our gallery on Walmgate, York. Get in touch if you'd like to know more about a specific painting, or for advice on scale, framing or placement.
