The Time Travellers Oasis 2014 Painting

I started working with the Astronaut figure in the 1990's. The character, emerged from a series of more war torn counterparts that I was developing at the time, and has been revisiting me at various points of what has turned out to be a long voyage. This enigmatic and many faceted being brings his own take to the genre of space travel. It's a journey as much through inner space as it is outer, a kind of catharsis in paint, sculpture and photography, through worlds that seem remarkably like our own but at the same time otherworldly too. The setting for this painting, is a kind of oasis, a place of refuge and escape. It has a New World, a land of discovery. In amongst the escape there is that sense of the surreal dislocation of modern life of “The Man Who Fell To Earth” too, the outsider, some one partly stranded in this world yet partly drifting toward another dimension altogether. There are echoes of Floyd and Kubrick's 2001 but there is something ancient and timeless at the same time, a kind of C21st Icarus or Gulliver.