A young fella.. 18 just..
He is sitting on a park bench in Bangor, County Down.
It is dawn and the sun is rising on the rest of his life.
A rabbit sits nearby as they often will in the early hours.
It seems like the Garden of Eden.
or is it the Garden of Gethsemani?
He has been staying with friends ten years older than himself.
They are Hippy-ish veterans of early LSD and jaunts in Canada and Mexico.
He is really only here because his girl friend has gone home to parents in Jamaica for the summer holiday.
We view him from behind his back so that we can see the vista..
You might think of Casper David Friedrich..
"the celebrated German Romantic painter who is best known for Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, or The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Painted in 1818, it is an image that evokes the full repertoire of themes we associate with European Romanticism: loneliness, sublimity, and the transformative encounter with spiritualised nature. It shows an unknown man whose back is to the viewer – a Rückenfigur, or figure from behind – a posture that draws us into the landscape that is spread out before him. Poised upon a rocky precipice, the Wanderer gazes down into a chaotic landscape of tempestuous clouds – a sea of fog that is pierced by jagged rocks."
Our guy today is dressed in his Civil Defence greatcoat that he got fro the army surplus store. He has long hair and flared trousers because this is 1970.
He looks out on a fractured dawn skyline as if the world is coming apart at the seams. The painting is on a tarpaulin which is stretched across another canvas painted with the universe or the stars at night. The tarpaulin is coming apart and is held together only by string. The seam where the tarpaulin is stitched together dissects the cavas diagonally. Reinforcing the idea of stress. The young fella has had an interesting night and all his certainties have gone awry.
Whilst the events depicted happened overlooking Belfast loch we see instead a fractured
Mountains of Mourne.
The Artist In Residence is coming of age.
His world has fallen apart and must be remade..
The painting is called
because love is all you need..
isn't it?
and because he and his friends sang that song from the trailer pulled along behind a tractor whilst on an adventure to collect and bring back turf for the fire at the farm near Ballycastle.
No comments:
Post a Comment