Blue Lotus

Large scale oil and ink painting.

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.

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.

Another in the Harvest series recalling memories of nature, the inevitable cycle of growth and death, and endless toil on the land.

The first painting with more than one figure allowed me to develop the idea of interplay between two figures along with the contrasts of light and dark in their various guises.

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

The last and largest piece completed for Blue Lotus, this painting is all about creation and downfall. It is meant to be read anti-clockwise from the eggs in the hand at the bottom of the composition, through self-realisation/corruption, deification and ego, before finishing with the tarot figures being taken to the next world by the dolphins.
Tangata manu (Bird-man) is the winner of a traditional competition by the inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where competitors would swim out to a nearby island to retrieve the first sooty tern’s eggs of the season. The winner was the first one back with the eggs in tact, who would be crowned bird-man. The figure in the painting is my version of the cult’s deity, Make-Make. In its hand is held a nest of eggs and a chick, a copy of a wood and ivory sculpture which was found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb.