Chamber 51

Here’s a painting seventeen years in the making! I stretched the canvas myself in 1995 and created what could only be described as a juvenile homage to Dali’s landscapes. It really was quite awful and I only saved it because it seemed like a waste to throw away such a massive canvas. In the early 2000s, I decided to start working on it again. I blanked out vast sections of it, kept some parts like the black mask, a couple of fish, the sky and the stereo, then abandoned it.

In late 2010 I started working on it again. This time I broke it up into sections using masking tape. The sections ended up looking like a spider web. The mask became an eye. Then I shelved it again. Finally in late 2011, I decided to get serious about completing it. The spider web thing wasn’t really working, and at the time I was trying to pick out wood flooring, so I had wood grain on my mind, so I turned the web into wood. I had also just finished painting hundreds of tentacles for Gorgonomcephalus, so some tentacles were laid down on the left side, which eventually turned green and became vines. The painting seemed to be missing reds, so I added the chillies. I liked the way they looked and started craving more red. Poured myself a glass of wine while I sat there trying to figure out how to add more red.

So the painting is finally done, many disparate elements, not really sure if it “works” to be honest, but there it is. My friend Arish Dastur came up with the name “Chamber 51.” I really like it because it doesn’t try to reference anything in the painting or tie anything together. It just adds another layer to it, pretty appropriate for a painting that just grew out of disparate ideas.