07.03
I have only just discovered this in my photo archives. Size: about 1 metre x 900mm).
I painted this in 2009, just before I had a major crisis with my vision (strokes to both my optic nerves – now 10% vision remaining, but happily, stable). It is an example of not being contrived (that has just reminded me of the Monty Python sketch of ‘not being seen’).
In other words, I painted it fairly quickly, then stopped before I ruined its ‘life.’ The title sums up the trials of living. I had not long lost my job as a contract tutor at the university, and my second marriage break-up within a week of that (which probably explains my vision trauma a few months later from stress). So, like past times of crisis, I turned to painting. I was a regular cartoonist and musician, at any time. But painting then was a more ‘escape’ mode for me.
So while painting “The Burning Ones,” I reached a point where it was time to walk away from it – and leave it be. I still like it, which says a lot. Years later, some of my works annoy me. Especially if they look a tad contrived. In many ways we are all Burning Ones – on the Pyre of Life.
“The Burning Ones” was exhibited some time later, along with another of my paintings “Mirror Heads” in 2010, as part of an exhibition called “Showing Their Bits” by Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) volunteers. Pic of me here, at the BRAG exhibition. Happy-looking chappy.
