About This Project

OK, the painting on the previous page I called – ‘Beguiled, Bedazzled, Betrayed.’
The one in front of you is the follow up which continues with a similar theme and subject matter.To be honest, I quite like this unorthodox stuff because it‘s bizarre, unconventional and, hopefully, engenders consternation and begs the question – Why?
If you think about it playwrights and filmmakers who are telling a story put their characters in locations and I do the same thing with my paintings.
Once I set the scene and decide on a location which, hopefully conveys a sense of atmosphere, then my story can unfold allowing everything else to pretty much fall into place.
So my choice of setting, my location, for this particular work is a tropical jungle.I don’t know where it is but I do know it’s not 6 kilometres from the outskirts of Helsinki. And, if it was then I’d have to paint bloody reindeer wandering in the background between the trees!
The characters are obviously indigenous and are sparsely clad because they’re in a tropical junglewhere it is, needless to say, as hot as an arsonist’s imagination!
The couple in the forefront are also ‘hot’ with passion for each other. The other character, in the background, is a sexually-repressed creature from a housing estate somewhere on the outskirts of Helsinki who tragically holds a heart-aching, unrequited love for the girl.
I’ve called it ‘Love Never Dies’ which is the tag-line I wrote, back in my advertising days, for Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Dracula. Andrew Lloyd Weber later pinched it as the title for his follow up to Phantom Of The Opera.
I like both the movie and my painting and I’ve never ever been to Helsinki!
I rest my case.