The work for the New York show with David Walker has been finished; the last job was the framing by Le Tunnadine prior to shipping (I wouldn’t trust anyone else!). It’s been an interesting set of paintings as I’ve been able to work on a lot of disparate ideas that have been rattling around my head for years.
Two pieces on the subject of the loss of political faith, which in a general sense thematically connect to a painting inspired by one of my favourite books – William Golding’s ‘The Spire’. This has been a particularly difficult painting that started as a six-foot wide diptych and finished as a three foot square single canvas.
The subject of Lilith has returned, inspired by comments from a local woman on the last Lilith painting. There’s still one piece to do to tie the original Lilith painting (currently in a collection on the other side of America) with the two paintings showing in Brooklyn but I’m not sure when that will come to fruition; and there are a couple of smaller painted self-portraits (that originated from a misguided idea to post a drawn self-portrait a day on this blog) which in turn led to a larger painting that returns to the series of ‘imaginary self-portraits’ I completed in the mid-nineties. The larger self-portrait is also the second panel of the original ‘The Spire’ diptych. It all seems to go round in circles…
Now I’ve got to finish the Behemoth show work for the St Martin-in-the-Fields show this September and hammer into the preparatory drawings for the Bologna exhibition inspired by Dante’s Inferno. If anybody’s interested and they want a good translation of the Inferno, I can recommend the Robin Kirkpatrick (Penguin Classics). Not that I know bugger-all.

“The Spire (Jocelin’s nail)”

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