Paintings & Memories for New Ways Forward

Based on my book, Visions of Faun’s, where I wrote about the fragmented memories of Faunn. Here I portent a young boy in a magical world, prior to the world turning into a nightmare. This is an idealisation of a poor reality. It turns the young boy, on the precipice of personal destruction, into a visionary who can see an altered reality, like a Indian mystic, now he gets to really live in his magical world.

Through his eyes he can see strange worlds, and he uses devices, optical devices, to see these worlds. He uses telescopes, mad crazy mechanical objects he makes himself out of glass and string and old radios and pianos. He uses radars and satellites. He sees ships and planes and flying saucers. There are worlds that he’s tuned into, planets, stars, comets, asteroids, black holes. There are natural objects which he befriends, particular the newts and frogs. He collects things in his world, playing cards, matchbox cards.

There would be Indian ephemera, chapattis, Indian goddess sculptures, incense burning, ornate gold jewellery. There would be (Joseph Cornell) boxes, cigar boxes with cotton wool beds, and on top lay a myriad of bird’s eggs. There are scenes by the sea, in woods, in trees.

This is about memories, real and make believe. This is about mythologizing to create the world which I dream Faunn witnessed. Faunn is the visionary boy, he sees the world which is pre-adolescent, prior to the reality which steels away childhood visions.

Is this a fantasy world without an edge, nothing dark or psychological, purely a pretty little fantasy world? With trees and tulips. No, this is filled with PATHOS. There is a coolness in the scene. Where there are multiple objects, its very important that colour is controlled and unified to create a whole, rather than a series of disparate objects.

Sometimes Faunn is dressed in an astronaut’s outfit, or a red Indian outfit, or jet pilots outfit, or a soldiers outfit, or a scientists outfit, etc. This refers to his history, who he could have been. What would his future have held for him? And the style of the painting, a chiaroscuro dark, shadowy evocative scene, peaceful and silent and half hidden.

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Pathos: the quality or power in forms of expression, evoking a feeling of pity, or of sympathetic and kindly sorrow or compassion.

Magical Realism: a style of painting and literature in which fantastic or imaginary and often unsettling images or events are depicted in a sharply detailed, realistic manner)