Good Friday
2025
The Countdown, 2025, pencil on paper, 28cm x 36cm
Thank you for all you've done..., 2025, pencil on paper, 28cm x 36cm
Sorry, The... You're Looking For Doesn't Exist , 2025, pencil on paper, 28cm x 36cm
In Dreams, 2025, pencil on paper, 28cm x 36cm
Good Friday is the name of a sequence of four figurative coloured pencil drawings that explore themes of severance, fatherhood, isolation, grief and memory. It is time torn up into chunks, a chain of immobile minutes, a kiss goodbye, a see you soon, I hope. Vibrant, assiduous, and somewhat ambivalent, Good Friday marks both an ending for this family and genesis of a life unaccompanied,
These drawings are about the instinct one may possess for structure & routine in the face of seismic personal and emotional change. For example in the third drawing 'Sorry, It Doesn't Exist' we see a figure (the artist?) seated at a dining table to eat his evening meal. Despite the divulgence of the precursory drawing, routine is preserved. All that should be happening is, and yet it isn't: the calendar is barren, the year and dates omitted, wiped clean. No past and no future. Time is away and someplace else. Our assumptions are confirmed by the phone screen displaying 404, an error code for when a webpage no longer exists or can no longer be reached; comfort, validation, commitment, love all seem very far away. By this point the figures in The Countdown are an abstract, their presence is metaphysical, evidenced by the glass of roses, and the leftover crusts on the lime green plate. The bags beneath his eyes droop down into his cheeks whilst the video on his phone malfunctions. Or perhaps he was reading? it is unverifiable. What we can see in this picture is the that the rule no screens at the dinner table does not apply. A house rule has been broken. What might happen next? perhaps the recurrent cat has the answer? At times her presence is ambassadorial, functioning as some strange mediator between us, and the protagonist. The cats eyes question, they probe, dare, and challenge and confront. In Thank you for all you've done... the cats expression is so violent, so paranoic that it perfuses the protagonist. The felines fanatical expression seems so potent as to feed the undetermined anguish of the protagonist. It is almost as though the cat feels for him, or that it conveys a farther aspect of his emotional state.
Despite these unsmiling themes, Good Friday is a colourful and vibrant sequence. The palette is