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- Adoration Of The Martyrs
- Bouquet
- Evening Baptism
- Journey's End
- Love In Kuwait
In 1992, following my return to Australia, I became fascinated with drawing threads from the past, combining a nostalgic historicism with contemporary issues, references, appropriations and even direct quotation of paintings to talk about current topics. I wrote at the time:
I like to seduce my audience, draw them in, hold their attention, and only then will I show them the things I really want them to see. The tangible physicality of the illusions I create is just such a seductive lie, for the world is a place of doubt and secrets. Because we can touch someone does not mean we can know them. I am afraid that the heart of the human condition is chaos, mystery and silence.
The painting 'Love in Kuwait' grew out of a photograph of firefighters in the burning oilfields after the Gulf War. It was like a scene from Dante's Inferno - but man-made. This seemed the appropriate setting for today's love.
Man at the end of the twentieth century is in many ways a sad and lost figure. His enterprising and pioneering spirit has proven to be poisonous; his technology is destroying the planet; his values are polluting the indigenous cultures of the world. Women are changing, requiring new things from him. All that was dear to him is being questioned and overturned. On the other hand, the woman in 'Love in Kuwait' is stoic and inscrutable - a waiting Sphinx.
It was with all these thoughts in mind that I decided on such a nostalgic and Victorian mood for these works. This was a period for saying good-bye to so much. In a sense the paintings are about things of the past, and that which must pass away.
Adoration of the Martyrs and the Rats in the Wall was painted in 1993, after the much publicised downfall of America's evangelists, Jim and Tammy Bakker. Being concerned with religious hypocrisy, I wanted the painting to look like an inversion of the traditional Renaissance polyptych (a multi-panelled, multi-imaged religious painting). All the hierarchies are upside-down. Christ and John the Baptist are headless at the bottom of the painting in a quotation from Piero della Francesca's painting 'The Baptism of Christ'. At the top are two figures from Correggio's 'Martyrdom of the Four Saints', a disturbingly beautiful, sick painting. In the centre are Jim and Tammy Bakker echoing the Baptism below them. The images are all woven together within the head of Mickey Mouse, mimicking the cathedral's stained glass windows, his hands bearing the Stigmata.
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