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Look up - ORIGINAL Oil Painting | 2022
£2,000.00
Look up - 2022
Oil on stretched box canvas, 1m × 1m
At the centre of the painting stands Taurus—the bull—head raised, looking directly out at the viewer. Beneath him, a rock teems with mycelial life, with tiny worlds woven through it. Each organism exists within its own reality: seeing, sensing and experiencing the world differently from everything around it. Our perception doesn’t simply show us the world; in many ways, it builds the world we inhabit.
Taurus stands amongst a flooded mountain range populated by sheep. Their heads remain down, feeding on the dregs of what is left, unaware—or unwilling to look up at—the world crumbling around them. The bull does the opposite. He sees.
Seven energy centres rise above his head, culminating at the summit of Mount Meru, positioned directly beneath Polaris, the North Star. Meru represents the centre; Polaris the fixed point above it. Earth itself becomes Heart—an anagram hidden within the word—a heart wounded at its core, but still capable of love.
The sun and moon sit within the composition as masculine and feminine energies: opposing forces that ultimately depend upon one another and must exist in balance. Storms fill the skies below, while beyond them are lights.
Look up.
Throughout the painting are hundreds of smaller symbols, faces, creatures and hidden details. Some are obvious, others deliberately buried. You could spend a week looking and probably still not find them all.
I painted this piece in 2022, spending around 100 hours on it. It was only my second oil painting after rediscovering my love of art, having barely picked up a brush since leaving school in 2012. The sheep were painted with a little help from my daughter, Elodie, who was four years old at the time—making that small part of the painting particularly important to me.
It has hung in my living room ever since. I never particularly intended to sell it, but after four years I feel ready to put something new on the wall. So, if the right person wants it, it’s time for it to go.
Original oil painting on stretched box canvas.
1m × 1m.
Price includes safe delivery to its new home.