‘Arid Confrontation’ (Oil painting on board, by Alan Rayner, 1973).
This painting, made when depressed after a year of postgraduate research,
depicts the limitations of the detached view of the observer excommunicated
from nature. After a long pilgrimage, access to life is barred from the objective
stare by the rigidity of artificial boundaries. A sun composed of semicircle and
triangles is caught between straight lines and weeps sundrops into a canalized
watercourse. Moonlight, transformed into penetrating shafts of fear encroaches
across the night sky above a plain of desolation. Life is withdrawn behind closed
doors.
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