Sam Wootton's oil-paintings render a generation whose "creative minds are no longer underfunded and misprioritised"

The Face’s fascinating newsletter pointed us to a wild variety of cultural/subaltern delights this week, preeminently that of Sam Wootton’s paintings, which we agreed with the Face were “surreal, well-dressed portraits that tap into tech, AI and the weird corners of the internet”

Sam makes this statement on his website:

My work often leans upon artifice as a reclaimed source of pride. We're in an age where 'real' has fallen through, and the worlds of technology, post-modernism and meme culture have seeped into the cracks.

I enjoy constructing this slow substitution as an act of magic. The future doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape, but can be conceptualised as an increasingly magical space wherein we can become anything.

Through my work I build a lore, or a mythological landscape, where creative minds are no longer underfunded and misprioritised, but reimagined as wizards, fairies and nymphs.

Harnessing the power of inter-disciplinary creative wizardry, we build a new, not yet imagined, future.

For fun, more items on The Face site include this map of current UK subcultures, Scottish skateboarders and independence, and London’s well-coiffed, pissed-off youth