SERENDIPITY #5 A Date Night with Elvis

​By happy coincidence - serendipity! - (I will get tired of this, but not before you) the exhibition is on for 23 days and since there are 23 paintings, for the sheer hell of it I will be posting about a painting every day throughout . . . ​​​

A Date Night with Elvis Acrylic & mixed media on canvas 46 x 61cm Available as Original Painting or A2 Print

The original wooden totem with a bone horn hangs above my work desk, over a foot long and more than half as wide it is quite an intimidating companion, staring out over me, questioning me to come up with the goods. There's an old squarehead nail banged into his bottom lip like a permanent smoke in the mouth. He's a happy chappy and I hope and he stays that way as I wouldn't want a head-butt from this cool, unicornman. The starting point for this was unsurprisingly the tip of his priapic tusk. Just what you imagine could be lurking under Elvis' greased back hair, the primitive horn that rises on date night.  A deep blood red stencil of the king himself hugging a beautiful girl into blissful joy. Lurking behind them is Lux Interior keeping hard eye on all the shenanigans going on. But it's all cool and groovy YEAH! the toxic exhalation of  lovesssss potion is in the air. Sitting astride all of this is the Angel Baptist and his devil's horns (one of few characters that I have borrowed - he was too hard to resist - comes from a fantastic 1965 children's book  by Swiss woodcut illustrator Robert Wyss). Of course the whole thing speaks of the anamilistic, the devlish, the primitive . . . which surprisingly isn't the musical accompaniment to this, instead it's Voodoo Idol by The Cramps which Lux sings with slight hysteria like he's reading from Tales from the Crypt . . .