British Boy

gicleé print on canvas

image size: 700 x 700 mm

edition size: 50

A head shot of an exotic male youth within a square gold-ochre format.

The square format serves compositionally as a visual altar from which we can study the subject: He faces front, the neck straight, as if posing for a passport photograph.His turquoise skin is contoured sculpturally,  reflecting light as a bronze sculpture in moonlight. It’s impossible to say if he is sitting or standing, as we only see him from the chest up.He appears to be nude except for a striking necklace of enormous fangs that radiate from the base of his neck. The necklace sits on his chest with the tips of the fangs ending just short of his nipples towards  the lower edge of the painting. His head is completely shaved and his overall presence reminiscent of a Buddha, yet his racial origin unclear because he appears to be all ethnicities combined into one, representing all. He gazes intensely to the right, dramatically revealing the whites of his eyes, but his posture remains immutable, as if by remaining motionless, he might avoid detection. He could be playing dead, a survival mechanism he might have learned from a creature in the Natural World, of which he clearly has a profound understanding. The white fangs of the necklace echo the whites of his eyes.