Original artwork description:

The idea for this painting came to me after a visit to the wonderful Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. The display is full of old scientific instruments and inventions, including many beautifully made brass instruments for measuring every aspect of the world around us.

In this painting, the instruments of measurement are discarded and forgotten. Nature has grown over them - -perhaps symbolising the ultimate irrelevance to nature itself of our long struggle to understand it. Humans have devoted their time, energy and resources for millenia in efforts to measure and quntify the world, but the natural world itself has no awareness of or interest in these efforts and subsist in one form or another, whatever we do.

The armadillo is an animal that seems almost to be composed of geometric forms; it is like a walking scientific instrument, but one that nature has produced effortlessly, with no need for measurement and reckoning. This painting imagines an encounter between this walking piece of geometry and the instruments laboriously created by man, which could never produce anything as perfect as an armadillo.

The painting is in hand-made egg tempera paint with gold leaf on a wooden panel, prepared with traditional gesso. It has a fixed frame, which cannot be removed. It is signed and dated on the reverse and has a picture cord attached so that it is ready to hang.

Materials used:

Wooden panel, traditional gesso, egg yolk, pigments, gold leaf

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