I'm scanning this year's works at the moment. Here is Iterations of Isolation, a momentously sad painting about the isolating barriers all too familiar to the likes of Nietzsche! I wanted to paint a painting that hummed with a deep darkness, like the sound of an obsidian block or the heartbeat of a black hole.
The idea is many years old and had remained half complete, huge and stretched on a canvas for years. It became trapped in complexity. This year I decide to complete or destroy everything that was half finished, and this was therefore resolved. I decided to repaint it on a smaller scale, packing the mountains into something as big as an office letter.
The essential idea was of monoliths within monoliths, rocks within rocks showing multiple layers of personality from external to the ultimate intimate baby. By the time that layer was reached though, the outer layers had become not mere tree rings but barriers that had isolated, and the introversion had trapped the psyche in a joke lonely hatred; the essence of the extreme right (I say joke because all such barriers are artificial constructs). I probably heard Pink Floyd's The Wall for the first time in this year and perhaps that became an influence.
I find the painting horrific, but I think it has succeeded in conveying the power I wanted. If I had found it lovely it would have failed as an artwork.
Technical notes. It's oil on perspex and 234x336mm (a little bigger than A4). It's painted in two layers.
