Man in a Boat

This painting was fed by two narratives and one experience. Initially inspired by some drawings made on the hoof on the Snake River in Wyoming, this panel painting Man in a boat and Yellow River and should be re-titled with my brother Piers’s name, as the effervescent wilderness man of the Earth he was who inspired a series of images of him in the wilderness.These pictures became as much an escapist world I painted for him as he fought to survive in the ICU unit in Newcastle in Australia. Both Man in a Boat and Yellow River were made as escape journeys for his imagination, so while dreaming he could fly low over water and see himself fishing at the magic hour as he was being operated on. I see them as visual humming aids, for him to drown out the noises of the serious stuff the surgical team were performing.

Piers needed to get away from England when I was young and along with my sisters, I day-dream with a smile the intoxication he brought to our Hampshire childhood. Leaving school at 15, he worked the world into his late 20's picking up so many jobs en route. Occasionally he returned on

his electric blue Honda Superdream 250, arriving and leaving with spraying gravel hunched over the handlebars, panniers stuffed with treasures from far off lands.We hollered and whooped for joy when he pitched up, thronging round his motorbike, ecstatic at the return of our prodigal brother! The silence of his absence was cushioned by the parcels he sent us, stamps on these packages telling us of his previous location which I plotted on a map, the line of his journey winding out like the opening scene of a Powell and Pressberger movie. Slides taken with his coverted Olympus and later Minolta SLR of the African savannah, his nakedness against his U-boat captain beard so shocking against the shadowy lushness of the surrounding bush.Travels in the Middle East, scenes of brutal metal island life on oil rigs, antelope skins, masks, a fez, tapes of music, records I still treasure, like David Franshaw's African Sanctus or an early JJ Cale album.When at home, he lived in the attic, an unfinished room packed with such riches, they had the equivalent fantastical impact of a hoard discovered in Lyndsey Anderson's film IF. His journeys took him further away each time until full distance halted him in Australia, and there he stayed. He was a highrise window cleaner cradled way above Sydney, a taxi driver, a rough-neck and derrickman, a fighter for aboriginal land rights in Alice, a remote travel guide to artists, Sarah Raphael included, and later a carer to the elderly and infirm, all the while being a man of self sufficient wonderment in the wilds. Life is fragile, and he is too far away, and my love for him is wrapped up in childhood, his myth, his prodigious inquisitiveness. His epic manliness. And so I paint him in his element out on the river, almost as if he were in one of my hypnagogic dreams - TH