In Prince Prospero's White Chamber Painting

It took me a long time to see Venice. I was 31 years old the first time I went there and like so many before me, I felt an immediate connection. So many things which had been on the periphery of my intellectual vision suddenly shifted into focus. The dark, misty environments of the gothic literature of my escapist adolescence were suddenly there before me. From Robert W. Chambers suggestive topography of Carcosa in The King in Yellow, back through the years to Edgar Allen Poe’s Mask of the Red Death, all of the details and set dressings that had been unconsciously filtered into my readings were suddenly in my immediate vicinity. That’s a strange experience. But so many of the 18th century paintings of the Venice Carnival scenes where I thought I might find a key to understanding me experience, except for the amazing drawings of Giandomenico Tiepolo, were and are somehow a little disappointing and I came to think that the conviction needed to render the heavy licentiousness of those fictional worlds needs both the repression of a bourgeois Dutch Protestant artists in the 17th century combined with the erotic frivolity of early 20th century illustrations from La Vie Parisienne and these were and I’m sure will continue to be my principal sources of inspiration while I was painting this and many other of my pictures. One of the first paintings I did around the Carcosa geography which is now, coincidentally in a collection in the Netherlands was a painting called The Perfection of Silver. The Painting here is essentially a development of that composition on a larger scale using different colour harmonies. The title comes from an environment mentioned in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story Mask of the Red Death. I have had a lot of fun imagining Prince Prospero’s parties.