This is the studio story of two dark oil paintings as they try to resolve being invaded by a flying beast with a Cupid on its back. Sometimes being in an artist studio is like a day at the races. You need to take a chance. This vlog is about taming the beast and facing fears while dreaming of adventure—thoughts prevalent in the past months of 2020 and now 2021. In my work, they have surfaced with this Cupid creature on a flying tiger. I talk a lot about Berlin because it takes years for influences I have experienced to emerge in my work, and I soaked in many images and stories there.

One hot summer night early in my time in Berlin, I had this crazy dream. This paper pirate character, I think it was me, left the bed and wandered around a desolate city looking at public art. The place was big and grey. He noticed he was being followed by a tiger, which happened to be the only colour in the dream, so the pirate began to run. I wrote about what happens next and the drawings that came out of here.

A few months after this mad dream, I was on the museum island in Berlin and saw a marble relief of this Cupid on a female lion or tiger. I obviously had a connection to it and filed it away in my head. Early in 2020, I played around with the idea of using it in etchings, which I will still do. Now I am changing direction by projecting the motif onto these large oils on canvas paintings which I have been working on for years.

I see these two dark canvases as nocturnal abstract paintings. I thought they were finished, but when I projected the image onto them, the narrative within the works changed dramatically.

It’s a gamble to change direction in a work I have invested in so heavily. This vlog is about what happened when I did, the different turns it took. I also reference earlier work influenced by the English painter Constable.