"When I design paintings, I carry them for months and years in my mind, in a ghostly form, comprised mainly of a gesture, poses suggesting a very particular group of emotions. I regard paintings as visual rather than literary. I don’t see them as a message or a story, so much as a human situation glimpsed momentarily from a moving train carriage. LE CORDAGE feels like an allegory to me, a fable. I saw three men grouped around a stark red-brown table, two of the men staring at each other knowingly, whilst their commander pins the viewer with his gaze, pinching his clothing between his thumbs and forefingers, pulling it out in a gesture of “Is this what I am?”, “Is this all that we are?“ I could see the table clearly in my mind, but could never find such a table, so I had to physically make it in my workshop, painting it and then distressing it with age. I knew that it the table had to be a shambles, with spilled tea and a random knife, specifically one of the knives that my father brought home from the war to my mother. A bone handled knife from the 1940s. The entire scene is set in the 1920s to 1940s I feel, and the backs of the chairs are a kind of punishment, hard vertical beams which I recreated from vintage circus poles. The entire painting is made using Raphael‘s Verdaccio palette, in which “black“ becomes dark brown, and the lightest “white“ becomes peppermint grey, giving the effect of “air“ in the painting. The flesh, with its green tint, is reminiscent of those altarpieces, and underlines the mortality and vulnerability that I seek in all my figures. I need them to look human. The writing around the outside of the painting is directly from the subconscious, whilst listening to my own prose, recorded and played back as I worked. but then the entire painting is very much from the subconscious, the rising moon, the dying day and three men around a red table conducting a ritual of sorts, two of the men embracing themselves in their need for comfort." Edward Povey