Curator Statement

Now this picture, in contrast to the last one which was very simple, this one is a very complicated painting because earlier in that particular year I had found out that I had prostate cancer, which a lot of guys get and men should talk more about but it kind of, it gives you a bit of a shock I guess and it makes you aware of your mortality and how much time you may have left. So this picture, which was also entered for the Archibald Prize, but unlike the first one I must say wasn’t hung, was a fairly confronting picture. I was starting to actually make another reef painting, in the bottom left hand corner is the remnants of that particular picture but then I suddenly started to think about prostate cancer, think about the changes in my body and this became a totally different kind of picture. It has my head, has no body, well it’s kind of scraped in if you look carefully but it’s essentially the head, and above the head the palette has turned into a clock, the clock is kind of, maybe 9:30 - 10-o’clock which is obviously got something to do with the amount of time that you have left and the bottom half of the painting deals with the fact that almost everything that you see at that point in time has a kind of sensuality about it, whether it’s the leaves, whether it’s parts of women, whether it’s legs, whether it’s breasts, everything has that kind of eroticism about it because that’s what the mind is thinking about and going through. So it’s a much, much more complicated painting than the previous one but I think quite important in the sense that it doesn’t matter so much what someone looks like, what someone looks like is comparatively easy. I think sometimes portraits really work when they tell you what someone feels like.