Approx. 94 cm (w) x 67 cm (h), oil paints over acrylic paints, on hessian, on board.
Date produced 1982-1983, while living at West Beach.

Yes, the painting is up the right way!

Take some time to ponder over the parts of the painting and why they might have been put together like that.

The first items to strike your eyes (after noticing the 2 main differently coloured regions) are supposed to be the face of someone (me) in bed, and the circles of the clock and the door knob. I tried to make them stand out and relate, seeing they are the only such shapes in the painting, and psychologically, we are drawn more to circles than rectangles. The clock is an alarm clock, with the alarm set for about 5 o’clock. The time shown is actually just after 6 o’clock (someone is sleeping in!). There is a stream of morning light indicated, between the two blinds covering the window. The alarm clock looks somewhat menacing, having been drawn larger than the person’s head, and in a position near the head to suggest that it might easily roll over it.

The painting is basically divided into two regions - a cold, flat, mechanically drawn (more formal) region, and a warm, more tactile, informal, organic region. To paint the flat region I had to fill and smoothen (a number of times), the coarse hessian weave for just that region.

The imagery has been drawn from a ‘first person’ perspective, to hopefully provide a better feeling of being there, of letting viewers experience the scene. The scene is being seen in a mirror, which is part of a bedroom dresser. There are a number of bedroom details, drawn in a simplified and cold, mechanical manner.

What then is the warm brown region around the other? Well, perhaps it is the reason the person doesn’t want to get out into the cold mechanical world dictated so much by ‘the clock’. (?)