James Day did not set out to become an artist who works in sculpture and miniature scenes of zombies on holiday. Twenty-five years ago, when he graduated in the summer of 2001, his work looked nothing like that. Getting from there to here is, in its way, the real story of his career.
Where It Started
In the early 2000s, Day was drawn to the Islamic world, and it showed in everything he made. His drawings from that period were bright and full of colour, often depicting Islamic architecture with an enthusiasm that jumps off the page even now. It was the kind of subject matter an artist returns to not because it is fashionable, but because it genuinely holds their attention, and for Day it clearly did.
A Decade of Cartoons
That interest did not fade in the 2010s. Instead, it changed shape, finding expression through cartoons that continued to draw on Islamic visual culture. It is easy to look at a career from a distance and imagine tidy, decisive turning points, but Day’s path through these years looks more like a long conversation with the same subject, conducted in whatever form suited him at the time.
A Cup of Tea, Twenty Years On
By the 2020s, Day had moved into photorealistic painting, and it was in this new, more exacting style that he returned once more to his longstanding fascination with the Islamic world, this time with I Like Mint Tea. The painting shows a glass of mint tea beside an ornate Islamic teapot, rendered with enough detail that the coolness of the drink feels almost tangible. Day wanted the painting to make viewers feel refreshed just by looking at it, and knowing the two decades of work that led up to it, the painting reads like an artist returning to familiar territory with new tools in hand.
Discovering Dalí
Long before any of this, back at school in the 1980s, Day had already fallen for Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists. That early admiration, particularly for Dalí’s work on the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, stayed with him for decades before it fully surfaced in his own painting. When it did, in works like Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder, it arrived fully formed. The painting sets an eye beside a glass of fruit cocktail, an odd pairing that nonetheless makes its point: beauty does not have one shape, and something as ordinary as a drink can hold as much of it as something as symbolically loaded as an eye.
An Apple in the Sky
Gravity, painted in 2025, takes Day’s surrealism somewhere more personal. The painting shows an apple rising into the sky above an English countryside of the kind Isaac Newton might have walked through centuries ago. Day has spoken about what this image means to him as an artist with autism. He finds something meaningful in figures like Newton, seeing in them a reminder that a different way of thinking can also produce something valuable and lasting, rather than treating it simply as history’s account of Newton himself. He describes it in terms of standing on the shoulders of giants, a phrase that captures both his gratitude for what came before him and his sense of continuing that work in his own direction.
A Turn Toward the Physical
Around 2020, something shifted again. Day began moving away from the flat surface of painting and photography and into sculpture and diorama making, building physical scenes rather than depicting them. For an artist who had spent two decades constructing imagined worlds on canvas, it was perhaps a natural next step, one that let him step inside the scenes he had previously only painted.
Holidaying with Zombies
Today, that instinct has led him somewhere unexpected: a series of dioramas depicting zombies on holiday. It sounds playful, and it is, but it also fits an artist who has never been afraid to place two unlikely things side by side and see what happens. Twenty-five years after those first bright drawings of Islamic buildings, James Day is still doing exactly that, just now in three dimensions, with a little more mischief than before.
Want to see where mischief meets art? Explore James Day’s latest dioramas, surreal paintings, and works-in-progress on Instagram at @thequirkypainter5.