Blue Lotus

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.

A mysterious and mystical plant revered and feared through the ages.

Large square painting of oil and Indian ink on treated paper drawings mounted on board.

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.

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

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.

Oil and ink on paper mounted on board and framed.