McAlpine’s work is conceptually engaging, technically excellent and responsive to many factors which are unique markers of this moment in time. His work not only allows for but prompts awareness and reflection on contemporary life and beyond.

Study on Found Card, is part of an ongoing series by the artist of photorealistic drawn portraits, where the sitter had their eyes obscured by objects, alien to the subjects body. This series of masked figures comments on human psyche and the flaws in modern modes of thinking, themes the artist continues to explore with new work.

"What is being toyed with is that we, in the digital age, are as it were, locked inside the territory that was more literally explored in the film, The Matrix. We are all Neo types, trying to negotiate our way inside the dark labyrinth of constructed reality pitted against the real, ‘forced’ to wear a visor or mask through which we peer at the world, unable to tell shadow from authentic substance.

The idea of the mask is an old trope used in art that reaches back to James Ensor, Emile Nolde, Picasso, Magritte (The Lovers), Louise Bourgeois (Woman House), and more recently, Cindy Sherman and Ndiritu Grace (The Nightingale). But McAlpine, building on that and others who have made the TV head images all-pervasivse, has contemporised the stratagem. We all wear blinkers on our heads, looking out at a world riddled with shape shifting platforms that belong to the mass/social media, acting as screens that interpret, distort, deform, filter, censor, manipulate, enflame, edit and colour reality.