Amima Sola
‘We were the Leopards and the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals and hyenas…’
‘The Leopard’ Giuseppe di Lampedusa.
‘His mind,… at one moment, as he was passing through a long gallery where a numerous colony of these creatures had gathered on the central pouf, got into a kind of hallucination; he felt like a keeper in a zoo looking after some hundred female monkeys; any moment he expected to see them clamber up the chandeliers and hang there by their tails, swinging to and fro, showing off their behinds and loosing a stream of nuts, shrieks and grins at pacific visitors below.’
‘The Leopard’ Giuseppe di Lampedusa.
‘We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’
Charles Darwin ‘The Descent of Man’ From ‘The Human Species’ A. Barnett.
This series of paintings infiltrated my studio practice persistently throughout 1993-4. The work had an immediate origin in the chromatic investigations of colour blindness and the monkey from ‘La Grande Jatte’ as described in the September1993 statement.
The figure on all fours has a pedigree in my peripheral interests. I had in 1980 made a life sized, two panelled, sectional drawing from the human figure of a man in identical posture. This image was derived from the anatomical drawings of George Stubbs and to a lesser degree Eadward Muybridges/Francis Bacons’ Paralytic Child on all Fours’.
The return of this image to my painting grew absolutely and unequivocally out of anger, paranoia and a profound loss of confidence in my self, my fellows and human worthiness as a bearer of any implied nobility.
This is a not unlikely déjà vu since the ‘monkey man’ represented the first stage in my juvenile loss of spiritual innocence.
Godwin Bradbeer