Since finding this location it took some time to visit at the right time of year and day and then to edit and refine my reference. I am constantly asked how long a painting takes to make and the simple answer is; a lifetime: all the influences one absorbs, the many years of practice, trial and error together with the accumulation of sights and experience which add up to a style and sensibility and the ability to really say with paint what you want to eloquently.

Arnold Boeklin’s work of the same name exists in several versions he made over the course of twenty years at the end of the nineteenth century and they are together perhaps the most emblematic work of the Symbolists. Together with Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer a bookending of a certain kind of existential German sensibility. On the one hand The Wanderer epitomizes the sublime and humankinds place within it and on the other The Isle of the Dead seems to convey an Orphic sublimation: the one a beginning and the other an ending. However both paintings imply a continuation or reversal since in both the figure acting as our intermediary beckoning us to follow them into the unknown and perhaps unknowable.

The finca depicted in this piece was to be found about 2km away from a road I frequently drove along. It took a few attempt to find the way to it despite it standing alone as if marooned in a sea of bone dry abandoned fields since dry ravines criss-crossed the plain and led nowhere. This all added to the sense that the finca was in fact a kind of mirage and one that resisted my attempt to know whether or not it was real.

Even more curiously, a week or two after I had finished the painting, I went back to the finca only to find it was no longer there; no trace to be found just more blank fields and a dirt track. Thus it felt inevitable and fitting that the title for this piece should be what it now is