Infant Naturale 001

I am sorry to state that the image of the following oil painting that the previous watercolour was a study for, has escaped me, and has been lost in the vicissitudes of friendship and time:

PAHMCN 30. The plane of innocence 1996, Oil on canvas. 140 x 100 cm. $300*

I do, however possess an image of it’s progeny, that you can see above:

PAHMCN 28. Miasma 1996, Oil on canvas. 147 x 90 cm. $300*

The inspiration was, not a ghastly fog of foulness, but in my youthful mind, a kind of projection, a spiritual emanation from the soul of one Horse out through space, transversing across the aether, into a beautiful and spiritual collective being comprised of all the souls of Horses.

As I said to our friend, Paul, from my previous story I suspect that I used about seven glazes of oil paint in this painting that is a melding of study and philosophy. These glazes have helpfully separated in the skeins of muscles that form the ‘miasmerising’ source Horse. This muscular chest is, of course, an appropriated George Stubbs anatomical study, given the midnight blue, mid salmon pinks and latté fawns, of my own invention. The emotional effect is similar to a warm embrace from a close friend or a close friend to be. The arabesques that form the highlighted muscle edges, draw the eye down, as perhaps the pathos of a man’s tie, or the crisp eliciting edge of a loosely painted blouse hem.

The middle section of the artwork has a depth that’s evocative of the cobalt blue depths with a thick loamy spray coursing off the Atlantic, or the world of blissful static that sounds in your ears as you sit in a car on warm evening after a fine Italian dinner, as the chocolate warmth and biscuit earthiness of cannoli cascades though your body as you listen to a half tuned digital radio, but you couldn’t care less. It is this static, like the fine tendril patterns of clouds that form in the sky on an evening after a warm spring day, which would mean volumes to a meteorologist, so too, it would speak to a Horse but not so much to you and I. The three black striations or staffs are like telegraph poles that cry communication between the source Horse, the collective soul of Horses, henceforth be referred to as Equus, and the receiver Horse. These days the whole process is moot, and taken for granted, in the technological humdrum of the Internet, but in 1996, such ways and means were merely the mist of dreams.

Searching through the stuffy confines of the cube that was the WK Hancock Library, as if it were slapped down onto a wide boulevard by cheeky alien kind, was where I spent many hours pouring through various books on Equine physiology, anatomy, and husbandry. Of all these tomes, the image that evinced the a piquant sense of humour in the wholehearted way that humans have subjugated the Equine race was to be found in this poor soul, who seems to have one ear cocked to hear the noise of his next overlord, traipsing through an autumn corridor at the end of a 80 million year old life (given that horses have already lived for 60 million years, I supposed). The reason for his lilac blue, daisy yellow and vermillion visage is based purely for the fact that his muscles, tendons, nervous system, sinuous system were all and separately printed (by some miracle) on Mylar sheets. I found his reticent but coquettish guise to be somber but it also rested on the edge of joy like melancholy.