COG17 CopyCOG 17 - (Adam & Eve) 200x60cms

 

Once the picture was up, I couldn't stop seeing the tower shape as a male figure and the Manhattan shape as female so I've changed the title, connecting of course to references to the Garden of Eden in the novel* I love the play between the object and image..the tower is both solid and transparent...it contains the image, it is behind the image, it looks down on the image, it is the image. The colours are luscious but the tower/figure adds a sinister oppressive note to the painting. 

 

COG17 2 Copy

 

There is a kind of madness in doing these large scale pieces - it's impossible to work on the floor anymore and the studio is getting smaller and smaller with every piece I make. But the scale is necessary and right because the intention is for the viewer to be in the painting, looking down from an enormous tower on Manhattan below or to be on the street, becoming Quinn, following Stillman.

 COG17 1 Copy

 

Love these words from Rothko, talking about scale: 'I paint very large pictures. I realise that histiorically the function of large pictures is painting something grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however - I think it applies to other painters I know - is precisely because I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command'  

The soundtrack to this painting was all 1970's: Pink Floyd's 'Animals', (thank-you, Andy Garner), Tom Waits's 'The Heart of Saturday Night' and 'Hejira', my favorite Joni Mitchell album.

 

COG17 4 Copy

 

COG17 8 Copy

 

*'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster