:: Shot By Eros ::

Whisper    Prisoner    Garden    Blade    Jaguar    Xibalba    Eros    Dying God   

:: 2011 :: 120cm x 60cm :: Acrylics, Inks and Markers on Canvas ::

This work, which brings the homoerotic element most strongly to the forefront of attention, springs from a curious waking experience when I was 21. Whilst dancing in a club very late at night, and half-asleep with exhaustion, I found myself somewhat lost in a labyrinth of my imagination, sensing that the club was filled with winged people, one of whom was Eros. He lightly hovered over to me and shot me with one of his arrows, and suddenly I was filled with the sense that this unreal flight of fancy masked what I sensed was a deeper reality: that I was not in the club at all, but lying outside, having been fatally struck by a speeding ambulance, and that the club and Eros imaginings were merely the product of my dying brain. I snapped ‘awake’ again and found myself back in the club, still dancing. This strange experience took on new meanings when I again found myself in the labyrinth of life. Most notably, the shimmering and unreal presence of the ambulance reminded me that sometimes what at first seems like violence and destruction can be an act of profound self-healing.

Shot By Eros

This work is a kind of developmental piece in that I have used it to explore ideas of transparency levels with ink/marker/acrylic media. Here, the ambulance image is shown through what I'm calling 'positive transparency' which denotes colour changes across line boundaries to achieve a layering, enfolding effect. In other works, I'm also exploring 'negative transparency' where the colour changes occur outside line boundaries (rather than within them), leaving a gap, or relative absence of colour change, across line boundaries to create a shimmering effect. This is perhaps not the best description, but the effect of negative transparency can be immediately seen in a recent experimental piece, 'Achilles Among The Women' - the women are layered in positive transparency but Achilles shimmers in negative transparency here suggesting a subtle immanent presence...

Achilles Among The Women
:: 2011 :: 60cm x 30cm :: Acrylics, Inks and Markers on Canvas ::

Achilles Among The Women

 

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