by John ClarkOil on canvas61 x 91 cm It is the predicament of the modern age; understanding seems powerless to change the direction of the forces it can explain. Its limits can be seen everywhere, from the climate crisis, to the destructive power of social media, from CEO pay and the startling rise of inequality to the marketisation of everything. Consensus borne of knowledge and understanding in all these areas is common, but doesn't seem to resolve in any course correction. Just the opposite, it often seems to make things worse. Or perhaps it's just the accompanying ideal of self realisation that makes things seem so fraught. With this in mind, the fact that the painting is of a single figure rather than the multitude that populated earlier centuries visions of the fall, is not irrelevant and speaks to the western focus on the individual rather than the group. It may, similarly, not be irrelevant that it is of a man. This study explores different ways of characterising the figure, from the more particular to the less. The final painting settles on a generalised form, but the study is a plausible alternatives and if selected it might be interesting to develop more takes on the figure. The final painting is an attempt to distil the complex set of ingredients that comprise the current circumstance, in which we are simultaneously the subject and object: all too aware of where we are but, in the isolation and sovereignty we have sought, apparently doomed to our watch our fate even as we live it.
