Watch Out, He’s Got a Gun

2022

diptych

oil on canvas

150x 244cm

I don’t remember much about the beginnings of this work, but after I had gone through an aggressive process of covering the recycled works I began to notice there were figures in the abstract mess.

In order to fully realise these figures I asked Sara and Mike to, as much as possible, assume the pose that I was seeing. They duly obliged and I photographed them. I also used a photo of myself as reference for the figure holding the weapon.

Tony once said that he liked the way I made the hands in my paintings. I told him that I worked hard to achieve enough reality to convince the eye. There are five hands in this painting and two were difficult to imagine and achieve. Tulay assisted with the perspective realisation of the man’s grip on the barrel of the gun, a detail I had been struggling with. Despite considerable focus the woman’s right hand remains ambiguous, which on reflection I like. It is left to the viewer to construct the reality of her grip on his arm based on the position of her body. Creating this reality was one of the big challenges of this painting.

As with Down the Barrel, the painting references a man holding a gun. As with The Pregnant Man we have a ‘female figure’ reaching from one panel to another. As with I Have Absoluetly No Idea What I am Doing (sic) and Earth Child we have an infant. On that subject, Leonie, after reading The Time Capsule, suggested that women would particularly enjoy this novel and other works because of the way I write about children.