“Joyful, idealized, fantastical and aspirational,” are all words that photographer, Erik Madigan Heck uses to describe art that he’s drawn to, art that inspires his own work. “It’s a world that I want to live in.” His large scale, painterly portraits are just that; magical, bewitching, like characters from a fairytale. “Portraiture is more about the artist than the sitter,” says Madigan Heck who’s photographed dozens of Hollywood greats from Natalie Portman and Saoirse Ronan, to Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore and Adele. “When I approach portraiture, I normally think of it more as just creating a work of art, something that I want to create around this person as oppose to a portrait of a person,” he says. “And so for me it becomes more about the use of colour, the person in a space, but it’s not necessarily a portrait of them… it almost becomes a portrait of myself.” The light and drama of old masters such as Caravaggio, Goya and Botticelli are strong sources of influence, as are the painterly colours of Vuillard and Bernard. His mother, also a painter, was an enormous influence; she took him to galleries on weekends and bought him his first camera. “She wanted me to engage with the world.” It’s Madigan Heck’s intense use of colour that distinguishes his work, and that renders his sitters regal, mystical and otherworldly. “My work is primarily about colour. The colour sometimes is the subject.”