'Cover Me: Smokescreen'

‘Cover Me Series’ of 24 drawings 2008 ‘Cover Me : Smokescreen’ Height 145.5cm x Width 107cm The concerns in this drawing are related to persistent newspaper coverage of slaughter, mayhem and disaster. So prevalent and explicit are the pictures we feed off every day that we are no longer troubled by the images and our retention of the visual information is cursory and dismissive. Drawing the comic turmoil of cowboy games of war, the fixed, funny and formal postures of the perpetrators revolve slowly in the mythical morass to reveal more realistic, believable figures of contemporary soldiers in attack or surrender stance. Flashed in the starkness of static action for tabloid consumption they are transformed and transcended in pencilled immutability. Unspecified uniforms lead to questions of guilt or innocence, friend or foe, hero or villain. Whose side are they on? Using pencil and black acrylic on thin and uneven Khadi Indian paper, a hand rubbed, woodcut printed text is also evident. Taking the phrase ‘A woodpecker hammered at a drainpipe’ from Cormac McCarthy’s poetic novels of the early American West, the line points to the futility of the action and the desperation of the bird. In the context of the drawing courageous endeavour towards the destruction of human life is rendered equally absurd. Landscape, dwelling and eons of time are implied by the text but not seen. Though the images are ciphers, the personalizing of the tanks is redolent of 17th century Persian battle drawings of armies described with infinite detail. Surrounded by buildings with tiny windows they reveal minute scenes of domestic life co-existing with the violence outside. Repetition and changes of scale lend pattern and restrained movement to the spatial compression. The slow speed of the reading invites intimacy within the formally distanced panorama as we, the viewers, unfold the visual saga and convoluted argument. Whose side are you on?