Broken Lance
Saint George, later in life, meets another dragon and things don’t go as well as they did last time.
George has had a good life but when he gets older and a bit wiser he begins to question things he would have taken for granted previously. Where is my beautiful lance? What is my beautiful lance? Why is that dragon looking at me that way? The lance, a symbol of sexual and spiritual virility is broken, it’s more of a snapped blind-persons cane. It’s a symbol of beliefs, of a faith that’s broken.
These Lance paintings are about my father, poor bugger, he wasted a large part of his life fooling around with a seriously fucked-up religion, only to find later in life that he didn’t have the resources to get past what he saw as a loss of faith. I said What does it matter? So there’s no God, move on to something else, open a bookshop or something
.
In an aphorism titled Loyal To Their Convictions,1 Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “The man who has a lot to do usually keeps his general views and opinions almost unchanged; as does each person who works in the service of an idea. He will never test the idea any more; he no longer has time for that. Indeed, it is contrary to his interests even to think it possible to discuss it.
Dad couldn’t get past it. He succumbed to the strain of it all and faded away over a number of years.
My advice, note to self, eat your greens, avoid trans-fat, go for a walk each day and don’t let those religious mutha-fuckers convince you there’s anything going on after you’re dead – you’ll forget what it was you loved and wind up in a special home for extra-demented-fundamentalists.
This painting is from a series of seven large figurative paintings from the early ’90s. They are all painted in oil on canvas and are large works at 1900 x 2000mm.
1 [ Book: Nietzche, Friedrich (1878). Human, All Too Human Aphorism Number 511 ]