Moon Monkey Candle
These are some drawings I made in 2012 and showed at the AM180 space in Prague. I've sold some of them and others are available now at Gallery Maxson in Palm Springs, California. Or directly from me. Here's a text I wrote to accompany my exhibition:
The still-life always seemed pretty boring. We looked at Morandi in an undergrad critique, an artist’s artist, making space with subtle shifts in colour. And there are Cezanne’s apples, the cosmic significance of which I would still like to understand. But I recently realised that the still-life, a bunch of objects on a table, can contain a whole world, the mark can endow it with an emotional symbolism. The glass is the fragile spirit, the rose is the (dying) hope for the future, the candle-stick is the past, and the monkey brings his own unpredictable, stupid and anarchic character. The whole piece becomes a kind of unconscious allegory. These are winter works, made in November and December 2012, entering the dark tunnel of night before the solstice. At this time of year we feel more clearly that life is a mystery, our thoughts become more internalised. We are like monkeys staring at the flame in the darkness of our souls. There are no easy answers.
“We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars.”
Ivan Turgenev