Blue Lotus

This was the first painting in which I thought about trying to articulate the space that exists between the physical and the spiritual experience, resulting in the violet shapes coming from the organs and the spine. The colour is used through this collection of paintings to signpost the spiritual element, developing from this early form into the more recognisably figurative later on.

The deceased figure’s physical being is going back to the earth. But will her spirit make it into heaven or be banished to the other world? And in any case, don’t they have more fun down there than those of us who live above ground?

One of the earliest paintings in the exhibition, in the formative stages of development of the half-man half-reptile creature which occurs and is refined later on.

In this painting I wanted to place the whole idea of taking flight within one body, so that not only the external tools of flying like feathers, but also the infinite space of the sky, was within the form, self sufficient and self contained.

Thinking about evolution, from reptilian prehistory through birds and into the mammalian realm.

From a life drawing at Vaulty Towers, a small room below the pub, where the model is always close, resulting in great angles and foreshortening. The bisection which divides the picture was either a rug or the skirting board, and I used it in this early painting as a first exploration into the duality between the conscious and the unconscious mind which reoccurs in subsequent Blue Lotus pictures.

Preserver of life in the form of boats, and vessel for which to take the body to the next life, as casket back into the soil.

Legendary London life model Barrie, sadly no longer with us, appears in this painting, whose start point was a drawing from 2018.