Public Highway Drivers (PHD)

Planning out a painting was never my thing- in this case I used a wide 1.5 inch brush and painted out the twisting and turning path in one continuous stroke. Then I set about turning it into a spaghetti bowl of highways, cars and lamp posts. The truck on the top center has the name of the painting (PHD) stenciled on the side. The idea here was that once the journey was over, you would land at the beach and retire in peace. At the time I was nearing the end of completing the PhD degree- the story goes that I was at a family gathering and an Uncle said "I have a PhD too, I am a Public Highway Driver!" indeed he was a truck driver. Thus was born the title to this painting.

Stained glass was a common motif in this phase, the jewel-like colours were fun to paint, and really stood out against the muted browns a greys. Here, I attempted to construct a sunset sky with small tiles of colour. As a whole this paintings worked out pretty well which was a relief after the previous two large works from 2003 were incomplete. PHD is one of those paintings that I could see myself redoing on an even larger format with even better technique in the future. It occurred to me that some of these paintings evolve from doodles, to small paintings, to large paintings, to even larger paintings. Gonna need a bigger portfolio I guess.

22 x 30" cold press, watercolour, 2003-2004