New painting: ‘Fighter and Flower’
‘Fighter and Flower’, 2026, egg tempera on panel, 31 × 21 cm
Towards the end of January I completed this painting, ‘Fighter and Flower’. it’s one of the small egg tempera works I have been working on this winter. The medium of egg tempera requires slow, methodical progress which could be an unacceptable constraint for some (and for me too, if I was working on another body of work that required a different approach) however my current focus is on forms that slowly emerge to suggest mask-like shields and shield-like masks.
The slow application of paint supports this endeavour, as the forms emerge in concert with the densely worked surfaces.
The title ‘Fighter and Flower’ came to me nearing completion. Over the years I’ve dealt with martial themes inspired by diverse sources from antiquity, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the Opium Wars in the 19th century and Greenham Common protests in the twentieth. With ‘Fighter and Flower’ I wanted to keep the reading as broad as possible, certainly there is no single hidden ‘story’. Instead it’s a result of thinking about masks and shields in the sense that they both offer forms of protection - each serves as an interface between the wearer and the world. This mask/shield idea is one way of thinking about how an artwork mediates between artist and viewer.
