Daniel Fletcher uses a playful spirit to represent the excitements and anxieties of daily life

We’ve previously championed the work of Daniel Fletcher, a master of curating shapes together in a way that make you feel fuzzy and warm with their considered simplicity. Daniel has started to gradually step away from illustration transferring his work to canvas, but with the same prepossessing qualities of his older work.

“Over the last year I have been developing a series of unique large format silkscreen prints onto canvas,” the artist tells It’s Nice That. “The work has a playful spirit rooted in a desire to express emotion and feeling through the personification of marks and form.” Contrast is a key counterpart to Daniel’s canvas pieces, utilising “soft marks against hard edges,” and “rich bright colours against subdued tones”.

This recent body of work acts as a “reflection of universal insecurities and optimisms in a world where social lives are very much on the public stage, and a new visual language of comic icons is leaned on to express our emotions,” he says. “I focus on constructing animate facial expressions that are disguised beneath a playful language of the everyday.” By using the “most stripped back components and features of the human face,” the work builds upon Daniel’s own experiences, “excitements, exhilarations and anxieties of daily life,” the artist explains. “Akin to laughing off a problem, these works playfully explore feelings, positive and negative, that we can easily brush off, enhance or suppress beneath our public profiles.”

In other Daniel Fletcher-related news, the artist has launched Foolscap Editions, a independent publisher “that works in close collaboration with artists to release books and special editions”. The first edition Bodywork is a publication Daniel produced closely with artist Elliot Fox.

“I have always been interested in the book as an exhibition space of sorts,” he explains. “To me, the book form is a very concentrated space that can facilitate interaction with artwork in a focused way as we do in the traditional white cube space.” With the aim to work thoughtfully with the artist at hand, Daniel has become a kind of publication curator. “Part of what I want to do with the artists with whom we collaborate is to offer up the space of the book to present some foundations of their practices that may not always be presented in the more traditional exhibition format.”

With its first book out in the world, Foolscap Editions will soon launch a website created with close friends studio 12-B, and “hopefully some sort of exhibition in the first half of next year,” as Daniel gets to work on developing the next couple of books. In the mean time, you can keep an eye on what he’s up to over on Instagram.