The 19th century could very well be encapsulated by
Caspar David Friedrich’s definitively Romantic ‘Wanderer’ and Arnold Boeklins’
epitome of Symbolist painting ‘Isle of the Dead’. There arose a sensibility
that averted its gaze away from the urban and industrial and addressed Nature
and a consequent peering into what has been called the sublime void.

Both paintings imply a journey: one outward, the other
inward. In both a guiding figure (analogous to Virgil’s role in Dante’s Diving
Comedy) lead us toward the horizon and perhaps further.

The Friedrich asks us to consider our place within the
sublime and the Boeklin leads us to into a void. However, both can equally be
read as beginning and/or destination.

The motif of places that exist but look as if they do not
is one I return to frequently.

The finca depicted in my piece was a place I passed often
in when living in Spain. About 2km from the road it took several attempts to
find a way to it. Despite it standing alone as if marooned in a sea of bone dry
abandoned fields and since the dry ravines that criss-crossed the plain led
everywhere but to this palm fringed island in the desert I had the sense that
the finca was perhaps a kind of mirage, a place that resisted all attempts
approach it but that lured one toward it.

A veil of Saharan desert dust hazed the view and a
vulture alighted on the ruin and I noticed that there were some people living
there, took some photos and departed. Returning to my studio with both
sufficient reference and after such an uncanny experience I spent the next
month or so completing the painting.

Soon after this I returned to the location to find the
finca bulldozed and erased, the migrant workers gone and spirals of dust
swirling in the hot wind.

What remains of that place are the myriad questions it
still evokes, a dusty plain and this painting.

It felt inevitable and fitting then that the title for this piece should
reference the Arnold Boeklin which remains one of my favourite paintings.