20 century collection
Acrylic on canvas, 263 x 310cm
Accession Number WAG10614
The two figures in this painting are allegorical portraits of the artist and his wife Diane, who at the time it was made was expecting their first child.
The artist was exploring the theme of man's relationship with the natural world in his work of this period. The landscape is richly studded with symbols of sexuality and fecundity and powerfully informed by a sense of the past and the future. Under the contemplative gaze of the kneeling artist the woman, with her strange, balletic pose and her heraldic, archaic costume, remains a figure of impenetrable mystery.