Talk Show Host

The Minotaur was originally painted by GF Watts in 1886 and shows the muscular man-beast crushing a little bird in his predatory paw. This can be read as a symbolist interpretation of the Greek Myth with the Minotaur waiting for seven young men and seven maidens the Athenians were required to sacrifice to him every nine years after losing a war with the Minoans; but Watt’s aim was political and was provoked by WT Stead's exposé of child prostitution in Victorian London in the 1885 article "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" in the Pall Mall Gazette.
Since then painting has lost its mainstream currency and has been declared irrelevant as a critical medium by the avant-garde.

Mindful of this “Death of Painting” my version is an attempt to raise the dead soul of the original and comment on one of the manifestations of society’s obsession with celebrity and the doyen of mass media, the television Talk Show Host. The brushwork is vigorous and the paint thin allowing the image to glow, giving a sensuous materiality that can only be simulated by the flickering screen.