A Project made up of 49 canvasses, each measuring 1 metre x 1 metre. Idea was firmulated as early as 1997, with a vague idea that if I sought validation through a process of reason and example, I would understand how to belong and cease to feel – as I did – in a perpetual state of being ‘at sixes and sevens’. 

The construction of a narrative through a series of single images, using a grid: Seven Rows of paintings, with Seven Columns. Forty-nine pictures, with one image sitting in the dead centre.

Work in Progress: Insurrectionary Behaviour within the Family

1. Red
2. Orange
3. Yellow
4. Green
5. Blue
6. Purple
7. Violet

1. Chastity
2. Temperance
3. Charity
4. Diligence
5. Patience
6. Kindness
7. Humility

1. Sun
2. Moon
3. Mars
4. Mercury
5. Jupiter
6. Venus
7. Saturn

1. Infancy
2. Childhood
3. Lover
4. Soldier
5. Justice
6. Old age
7. Dementia

1. Ear
2. Eye
3. Nostril
4. Mouth
5. Nostril
6. Eye
7. Ear

1. Monday
2. Tuesday
3. Wednesday
4. Thursday
5. Friday
6. Saturday
7. Sunday

1. Asia
2. Africa
3. North America
4. South America
5. Antarctica
6. Europe
7. Australia

1. Great Pyramid of Giza
2. Statue of Zeus at Olympia
3. Lighthouse of Alexandria
4. Colossus of Rhodes
5. Hanging Gardens of Babylon
6. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
7. Temple of Artemis

1. Lust
2. Gluttony
3. Avarice
4. Sloth
5. Wrath
6. Envy
7. Pride

Hogarth’s satirical etchings drawing on Greek mythology. Orpheus and the Underworld. The Rock of Sisyphus. The story of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

The narratives that weave their way through the images and the schematic employ themes of: all that rises, all that sinks, the tension between the two. Of feeling tethered, not anchored. The bitterness of Love/Hate, ebfore understanding that love shouldn’t be so harmful. A moral compass drawn from instinctive and memetic codes of practice.

Orpheus Descending & The Lady of Shalott

Orpheus Descending: the Tennessee Williams play, which was made into the film The Fugitive Kind.

Lady Torrance in The Fugitive Kind; passionate, tortured and cursed by the conventions of a narrow-minded society. The Lady of Shalott – the Victorian ballad by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The mirror crack’d from side to side;
The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.

The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side – The Lady of Shalott submits and lays herself down, with the drama of a Gone with the Wind Scorched Earth Policy unfolding in the background. As Tara is threatened with burning, the creative working-class woman, imprisoned by child-rearing and a conventional society, wastes years barricaded indoors, watching the Starling Moot swoop overhead…

The Hogarthian Project: Marriage a la Mode

‘Marriage A-la-Mode’ the first of Hogarth’s satirical moralising series of engravings that took the upper echelons of society as its subject. The story starts in the mansion of the Earl Squander who is arranging to marry his son to the daughter of a wealthy but mean city merchant. It ends with the murder of the son and the suicide of the daughter.

Marriage A-la-Mode:
No.1 – The Marriage Settlement
No.2 – The Tête à Tête
No.3 – The Inspection
No.4 –  The Toilette
No.5 – The Bagnio
No.6 –  The Lady’s Death

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats – an allegory to describe the atmosphere of Post-War Europe.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Self-Schema

Referring to the beliefs and ideas people have about themselves. These beliefs are used to guide and organise information processing, especially when the information is significant to the self. Self-schemas are important to a person’s overall self-concept.

Once we have developed a schema about ourselves there is a strong tendency for that schema to be maintained by a bias in what we attend to, a bias in what we remember, and a bias in what we are prepared to accept as true about ourselves. Our self-schema becomes self-perpetuating. The self-schema is then stored in long-term memory and both facilitates and biases the processing of personally relevant information.

Such a short time it took me to fall, 2010, 100cm x 100cm, acrylic on canvas