Over the last ten months the most recurrent motif in my painting has been the falling figure. It does not need much explanation to realise that this is a clear, perhaps cliched, symbol of tragedy. The falls inevitability ensures that.

Yet a few things have always bugged me about it. Partly I feel that it is symptomatic of my personality. A middle class, sheltered, western man/boy trying to dramatise the nuances of his life. An attempt to try and create theatre out of the mundane numbness of the confortable and privaliged existence. So we create narrative, situation, visual hyperbole to construct some imagined situation out of the ordinary.

In other words the truth is not the fall, for has there even been the rise to enable that. And the relative nature of space, according to basic physics, ensures that is essential… even in a phycological sense. The truth is the desire for the fall. Wishing to have fallen when you have never left the floor.

I think this is what my recent sketches are about. I will upload below shortly. They seem to be a direct, and perhaps overly considered, response to Andy’s observations on the falling figure in ‘The Pink Lady’. He felt the figure looked more like it was already on the floor, scrambling about as if it had fallen, rather than being in the process of the fall.

I kind of like the idea of a figure scrambling about, trying to reach inside itself. Squirming in an attempt to appear to have just fallen, when actually its just a pathetic roll about on the floor.

Suddenly the scream is not the primal scream of true horror. It’s another type of silent scream, a pathetic cry which does not exist because there is nothing to scream about. Its the worthless trying to give itself a heroic status, but realising that it belongs, not even in the gutter, but at the more bland spatial field of the floor.