I have just finished this great painting in
time for the show in Liverpool, which opens on 13th November.
I say 'great', because it is one of the
largest pieces I've made - 1m square - but also because it's been a long time
in the making, and I'm very proud of it.
It started as an abstract composition of
ship elements based on golden ratios and diagonals, which I've been using for
some time now as a way of disciplining a painting's geometry. It has rivets - I researched into
shipyard riveting before I made them - and they are clogged up with puddings of
paint, and rust seeps through from below.
I laid the painting aside some months ago,
and recently I started working again on it, adding some red paint which firmly
anchored it as being on the waterline of the ship. But the diagonal composition (at the golden section angle of
32°) suggested that this ship could only be sinking - and yet, here was I, the artist, close enough to touch it
whilst it was sinking. I realised
what a tragic place this was ... inside the ship, just beyond the surface of my
paint, people were about to drown - and here, outside, I was an observer - or
was I also struggling for my life as the ship went down?
Well, it's just a hundred years since
merchant ships of all sides started to be sent to the bottom in the First World
War. I have always been sensitive
to the memory of the sailors on all sides who died in that way - I learned that
from my own father's deeply emotional trips to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day just how strongly he believed that the
bond between seafarers was stronger than even national allegiances in time of
war.
So I have called this painting Remembrance
in honour of the seafarers who perished a
century or so ago as a result of the grievances being pursued very far away from them. And, unlike those partisan poppies at the Tower of London that have recently been in the news, this respects them all.
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