Caravaggio's Fruit
Dreams of Descent & Dreams of Life
1300 × 2200mm each · Acrylic on Canvas · 1999
The Caravaggio paintings are mainly inspired by the fruit in two paintings
he produced in his early period in Rome around 1598, when Caravaggio was 25 years old.
The over-ripeness of his fruit excites me on a creative level —
it gives a key into his personality.
Dreams of Descent and Dreams of Life were inspired by the fruit in Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, painted in Rome around 1598 when he was 25 years old.
Caravaggio departed Renaissance aesthetics by rejecting idealised beauty. The over-ripeness of his fruit excites me on a creative level and gives a key into his personality.
The canvas for these paintings are off-cuts from the backdrops for the Hong Kong Ballet's production of Swan Lake, which I painted while working at Scenic Studios in Melbourne. Part of my process while painting these works was to replicate some of the techniques used in my scenic art day job — using a grid to scale up an image provided the painting's basic composition, allowing the inner life, or subtext, to be exposed to the viewer.
In Dreams of Life I have set 3D ultrasound portraits of foetuses in the grapes. Throughout this painting are images of the unborn, which like seeds are waiting to grow.
Dreams of Descent holds images of darker myths — the Minotaur curled, and Icarus descending...
Behind me is the diptych Dreams of Descent / Dreams of Life, in my Bardon studio 2001
One of the early Caravaggio's Fruit paintings in my St. Kilda Rd. Studio, Melbourne, around 1997–98