Favoured Son, Since Forgotten

The year before last I had, for college, to do a project on art and music. I chose Dead Can Dance as my inspiration. Many of the pictures I made during the project were illustrations for songs. This is not. It may be inspired by 'Rakim', and incorporate themes from the song, but it us not an illustration for the song. This was painted from late October 2006 to early January 2007, and is dated December 2006 (because I thought I had finished it, and I hadn't). My friend and I calculated that I had spent several hundred hours in its production. This is because I totally re-did large sections several times over.

It's a portrait of living in the past, of dreaming of a former golden age when things were better, of being so consumed in the grief of loosing it that the present is ignored and wasted.

The story behind this is of a Prince who through bad decisions and good intentions, had his city-state burnt and destroyed. He is sitting on a tree in the ruins. Maybe he's returning to visit after long exile, maybe he's a ghost haunting the ruins, maybe he never left, and now lives alone in the ruins of his palace...

He is drawn constantly to the place of his undoing, eternally caught in the grief of his loss. He lets his hair run to tangles, and his clothes fall any which-way, and is caught in the guilt for what he perceives he has done, and mourning what he has lost, his family and his Empire. All the while he dreams of old parades and feasts, of his long-gone jewels and lanterns, of the trappings of wealth and the privileges of power.

It has been a very, very long time since it happened, but he is now perpetually caught in that moment, in a sort of mental 'Groundhog Day' and sits around re-reading poems glorifying his empire, living in the memories of what was.

I wanted the painting to have aspects of realism, and yet a dream-like quality. I restricted my pallet, and deliberately gave close attention the the foreground plants, blurring the distant trees to shapes of green in the background, because in dreams, or at least my dreams, it is the things I am directly looking at that are the most real, and the rest of the world is more suggested than present.

I very carefully chose the colour scheme, and it has a symbolic significance. Red is for the blood of the dead, those who once lived in those ruins, and it is a sumptuous colour, of great wealth. It is the colour of passion, and even though the events that brought the "Favoured Son" to be consumed in his woe are long, the pain is sincere and passionate when he returns to what was once his palace long ago.

Gold and yellow are for what he remembers as a golden age. It is as if we see through his eyes, everything golden, but unlike his view, the world is dark, not glowing. It is evening, and we can see this. His Empire is gone forever, and one day there will only be the trees. It is also the golden glow thrown around happy memories, and the yellowing of ageing. His memories are growing old, turning yellow like the pages he is holding. Yellow is for the heat of the sun, and as a hint of the sunset. Skies aren't naturally that yellow. It's almost a fantastic or alien sky somewhere a million miles from our reality, but this is because it is a product of his reality -or rather, reality according to his imagination.

Dark brown and black, all the shadow, that is what living in the past does to one's present -buries it in "the shadows of summers now past" (That's a line from 'Severance' -More from Dead Can Dance...).

Green is for nature, for new life. Things will continue with out him, the world will keep growing, and eventually his city will be ruins in a forest, home to monkeys and colourful birds. Millennia from his day, archaeologists will go there, and people will marvel at his lost civilisation, forgotten for centuries and then revealed. Green is also what he isn't wearing, and the trees he is ignoring, and expression of how he is ignoring that, detaching himself from the present to linger in the past.

The colours, especially the general golden appearance, are strongly linked, to me, with the old religious icons. There's nothing religious about this painting -it is about human things- but those icons always gave me a sense of being from almost another world, being from so far away, so long ago, from such a different culture, and I wanted him to have that sense of being from a long lost and distant culture.

I also wanted to make it clear he isn't a real person, he's a personification of being unable to let go of the past. He is posed oddly, and his clothes have exaggerated drapery. I know most things would have to be deliberately and carefully folded to look like that, and would never naturally fall into so many folds, but this is again a nod to the old icons, to a time where drapery didn't just indicate the form beneath and be representation of clothes, but when it was something to be played with, to make patterns with.

The statue's face is both a reference to these two pictures: [link] and [link] but the angle of the face is different, even if it is the same design statue head. There are reasons for the difference, which I can explain if you want, but this post is getting long already. It's also, as are the other to, pointing back to the great Shelley poem, Ozymandias [link] although I think the symbolism of those statues is best left for me to write up on the two images of just those statues, and to comment here on why it is different in this painting. (There are, although not all are visible, fourteen lines of text spread between the three papers with poetry on them. Sonnets have 14 lines, and it's my little 'secret' tribute to the great poet.)