A Damsel With A Dulcimer 2000 Oil on canvas 57 x 44 cm Commissioned by a friend. I had just been given the sack and betrayed by my fellow workmates. I was reading a lot and looking for ‘hope’. I came across the date of when Coleridge almost certainly wrote Kubla Khan accidentally - it was exactly 200 years to the day so I travelled up to Lynton and found the farm he stayed at. The occupants let me onto their property. I sat down, read the poem, looked over the gorge into the sea, and while I was sitting there, a full rainbow appeared exactly skirting one side of the gorge to the other. It blew my mind. People let me down, God never does, or the massive ancestral spirits my Art forces me to commune with. This is all a bit different now as I am a practising Buddhist and accept that God does not exist. The Steamer is one of the boats I travelled across the Firth of Clyde to our holiday flat in my childhood and it’s power is and always will be majestic in my mind. |