Forest Fire Charcoal on paper

122 x 46cm

2024

Les Feux du Mal (Apocalypse Now)

Contemporary History Painting was the succinct, headline answer I gave when recently asked ; what is it that you do.

This piece came about in preparation for my recent exhibition in Bruton in the UK. Without sufficient space to show more than one of my large scale pieces in the series ‘The Tainted Sublime’ and wishing to demonstrate my use of forest fire charcoal I had decided to work on a much smaller scale and to do so within the show.

I had yet to decide what the composition would be beyond it being another fire piece when for no particular reason I began watching Apocalypse Now. The previous week I had completed a fresh, small triptych of single palm trees in charcoal with the same title as a prior palm triptych: ‘Dum Spiro Spero’ (While I Breath, I Hope). Palm trees have become a key motif in my work; the symbolism of which is inverted in my use of it.

Thus primed I saw the opening sequence of the film and knew instantly that it would form the basis of this composition. The peculiar blooming and blossoming forms of the napalm strafed palm forest and the contrast of these soft forms against the starker, silhouetted and skeletal palms which I added thus suggested the theme and ultimately the final title.

The layering of motifs, their derivation, allied with the multiple references I make; from contemporary environmental destruction back through Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic updating of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and through a simple play on words locating the piece within the Symbolist tradition influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s magnum opus Les Fleury du Mal combine with the material used to make it add up to much more than that simple headline description.