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antidote

17" x 11", watercolour, 1998, private collection

I'm in the middle of doing a comprehensive inventory of my artwork and it is interesting to see just how many paintings I have incorporated the so-called Matrix* motif into. Even before I really started painting in 1988, I can remember making these patterns in pen or pencil years before high school. The next run of posts will be about paintings containing the Matrix motif --some of them from 1998 when I implemented Operation: Waterstorm (one painting per week for a year).

With this painting I tried to return to my early attempts (along with Peter Kovacs) to bring the Matrix into the subject's form (changing the hues, but not following the contours). I've only tried that a few times and would like to explore that more...

I used a model from a magazine for this --which is strange, considering the voluminous photo ref I'd recently shot and used that year...

The significance of this painting's title is referred to in this post about evade, but there's also this from the song "Blunt" by Wild Strawberries:
All that I need is an antidote
All that I need is a muse




*Having nothing whatsoever to do with the movies, this motif was thus referred to (and subsequently named) by Ian Anderson (a friend in high school --not the guy from Jethro Tull) after seeing Cultural Mess (or, possibly, Fruitful Mess, the one Peter and I did right after it), simply thinking that's what that "stained glass" pattern/motif was actually called. Well, it was after that...

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