Perhaps I should elaborate on these two paintings.
They were done LAST MINUTE in the lead up to an art exhibition which took place in Q car park in Soho with the theme ‘EMBRACING THE UNDERDOG’.
The painting’s INCEPTION and ultimate desctruction came about in a haze of trauma after the recent loss of my sister (who died in hospital not in any of my paintings). I was so overcome with emotion as I was made to leave my flat that I threw them out onto the street to be picked up by trash collectors.
Contrary to first glance it’s not a painting about death, it’s a painting about LIFE, and a fight for its SURVIVAL. It’s a warning about the CHASM which lies in the space between VIRTUAL living and real life CONNECTIONS. It’s a painting about living for another day, even if, some place else. It’s a painting about liberty and painted prisons.
I’ll have to figure out a better way to explain this. It’s way more complex but maybe the viewer has to draw their own conclusion.
Originally I was starting off with this idea that scientific orthodoxy and technology is going to try to make us fit into a rubix cube, but that human frailty isn’t shaped to fit into neat formations.
The week my sister died, the internet connection was down in my area. She’d left a page open on her computer depicting the opium trade in Afghanistan. She had been watching a documentary on child addicts.
Maybe she’d found where it all started. This drug flooded the area around the same time the film was made and brought war into her teenage bedroom.
Also she was at the end of her tether – with no one to reach to retail the enormity of the complexity of her problems which had ballooned into a catch 22. She left with a ‘hello?’, not a goodbye.