The Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-based painter Honor Titus may have grown up in a musical household (his father, Andres “Dres” Titus, was in rap outfit Black Sheep), and he even formed his own hardcore band, Cerebral Ballzy, as a teen, but he takes a rather more literary approach to his dreamy, nostalgic paintings. “Music is still a big part of my practice, but literature gives me a ton of ideas,” says the 33-year-old, who cites Evelyn Waugh and Jean Genet, alongside the songs of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, as inspirations. “Sometimes a certain sentence will evoke a feeling that I just try to make visual.”
For his first solo show in London, Bourgeoisie in Bloom at the Timothy Taylor gallery, opening this month, Titus was inspired by one his favourite movies, Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, which chronicled the antics of a group of upper-class preppies and debutantes on the verge of adulthood in Manhattan. The refined subject matter may seem at odds with his countercultural roots, but for Titus it makes a perverse sort of sense.
