Surprise

This may be my favourite of the paintings I have done so far. Rather than a conventional portrait, the act of painting eclipsed the actual subject as layers of paint were worked over and over, the pose and expression changing until the final state was reached where it felt right to me.

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Dylan Shearsby (born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1979) is a painter and storyboard artist working in film and television. He studied Japanese Sumi-e with the late master Andre Sollier and watercolour with Andrew Gemmill.

As a storyboard artist Dylan has worked on six feature films including the upcoming War Machine (Netflix), Insidious 6 , Saccharine (Stan), along with many TV series and hundreds of commercials.

He has written and illustrated three children’s books, Upside Down Sid, Upside Down Sid Goes to Work (2018), and Waiters in Elevators (2025), published by Little Hare, a Hardie Grant imprint.

Inspired by Andrew Wyeth, Ann Gale and Antonio Lopez Garcia, Dylan seeks to blend realism with the distortion of dreams. The human figure, the natural environment and movement are central themes in his work.

Dylan occasionally teaches figure drawing and painting workshops.