Despair

This is not going to be to everyone's taste, but it is one of my favourites. It took me no longer than 45 minutes. I like it because it is packed with emotion, passion, despair. It's a concept piece: I painted myself from an upturned mirror. I was feeling a little oppressed at the time, though not as bad as this might suggest! What I concentrated on was infusing the painting with all of my past pains and sorrows - better out than in. It's an artistic representation of a reduction of despair - as though despair could be simmered in a pan until in reaches a thick, sticky bitumen. 

It's one of the great gifts of painting - one is able dump negative emotions on canvas and boards in terms of a correlation of shape and colour. And it works. I felt positively elated afterwards. 

To achieve the murky, confused, dirty look - I simply never cleaned the brush. I mixed yellows with blacks, umbers and siennas. If I applied a thick helping of yellow paint for brightness, it would be immediately tinged with the dark remnants of the colour before. The effects it created is perfect. I could never have envisaged it before I started. 

I think it draws comparisons with Edvard Munch's The Scream. A archetypical embodiment of dripping misery and choking despair; the neck lengthened and stretched as it is sucked upwards into the blackness, into the gloom.