I grew up in the 1950s. Identifying strongly with the romantic and heroic cowboys of film and screen, I longed for being ‘Davey Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier’.
In my twenties I lived my dream in the outback of Australia, Labrador and the Yukon in Canada. I performed as ‘Klondike Annie’, at the Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City and lived in the log cabin I wished for whilst a young music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London in the late 1960s. ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Cowboy/Entertainer – she remembers the snowy mountains’ refers to that time in Canada and the increasing threat to nature and mankind due to climate change.
In this series, ‘Wanderlust and the Denial of Death’, I consider growing older whilst witnessing radical changes to a world so different from the one I knew in the 1960s and 70s.
‘Three Wise Cowboys – See No, Hear No, Speak No Evil’ represents mankind’s exploitative attitude directly responsible for creating this bleak scenario in which we now live. The desert of ‘Adios Amigos – shame it’s too late’ depicts our predicament.
My aim from the past year’s work was to develop my ability to capture the subject’s essence in the portrait rather than being concerned with a realistic representation of the individual. I am privileged to have been allowed to paint Vivian Ezugha, a fellow artist.One equally filled with wanderlust and a love of life.
