Initiated as an ink pen drawing, this work naturally followed on from ‘In a State of Limbo’ (see previous entry), though this time I had moved from a position of reactive social environment to an introverted isolation which I unwittingly found when communing with nature.
Brickhill Woods in north Buckinghamshire is perhaps where I spent an inordinate amount of time meditating amongst the trees and undergrowth, hiding myself away from the troubled aspects of my social degeneration.
There is a sense of clandestine ritual affiliated to the rawness of emotion in the depiction of my figure, so close to defeat yet somehow managing to claw at an exit from the dilemma of the situation. The fact that I had painted the work in oil was of no real concern to me at that time, it was a medium introduced to me during my A level education. It was a medium that I had little experience with, but I took too oil paint like a duck too water. I felt as though somehow the paint in its sticky lustrous malleability, extracted without effort, the emotional input of making a painting.
I had little educated technical knowledge of the medium and so I relied purely on my naivety of it which left me only being concerned with the actual expression of painting itself. It was as though the oil paint had a life of its own and I played just a small part of putting it on the canvas whether that was with brushes, knives, rags or my hands.
The original painting, after having been stored in a friends loft for three years, and then moved several times to other locations around Milton Keynes has become lost somewhere along the way, perhaps this is a fitting end to the lowest point of my life.
