Invading the Scene Print

Troy Slater is an award winning multidisciplinary artist based in the city of Carlisle, located at the edge of the stunning English Lake District. Troy was born in 1976 in Istanbul and raised in Carlisle, but a huge amount of his early life was spent travelling due to his parents’ work. This connection to the city that spans two cultures and continents has been a huge influence on his vision of creativity and his passion for diversity. His love of travel and experiencing new cultures is enduring, the versatility embedding itself into his artistic psyche. Troy uses painting, drawing, digital art, tattoo art and music in order to express creative visions across a myriad of projects. Over 25 years of exhibiting and working to commission, Troy’s work has reached the USA, Canada, Australia and Turkey. His portfolio includes portraiture, landscape and abstract painting, murals, brand design, album covers, book illustration and audio and video production. Troys earliest influences in the visual arts began at a young age with comic books and science fiction and fantasy films. He learned to draw by copying the black and white line drawings by legendary illustrators such as Brian Bolland, Glenn Fabry and Simon Bisley. Simon Bisley created the first ever fully painted comic strip when Troy was 11 years old and the inspiration from this ignited a desire to learn how to paint and use colour. A love and respect for all painters throughout time was born from this early exploration of art history, particularly the Renaissance and the development of visual art in Paris between the mid 19th and 20th centuries. Tamara de Lempicka remains one of Troys greatest influences. Her style, a marriage of realism and abstract impressionism, can be referenced in his renditions of the female form. Notably Troy has exhibited at The Affordable Art Fair in London, worked on soundscape production for the 2012 Olympics, won the Carlisle Living magazine 2017 Style in the City award and co-organised and participated in the successful West Walls Artists Now exhibition in 2019 that won an Arts and Cultural Initiative award. Troy currently works as a tattoo artist and focuses on figurative acrylic painting while spending his spare time producing music. STATEMENT Each project I work on has its own philosophy, its own set of rules and its own individual genesis of ideas. But in the end, to me, it is all just one grand work of art.