Then at last before I fell 2026 – 25 x 18cm, acrylic, spray paint, wire, on canvas
The title is a line from Beckett’s The End, 1954. The retrospective construction of a moment before collapse, the last thing known or seen before the falling. The painting was made in that spirit: layers applied over an existing work, a face erased beneath paint, the broadcaster converted into ground, the attention economy buried under the conditions in which a single flower grows.
The pencil lines of the original composition ghost through the dark layers, arcing marks, the suggestion of a head, a screen, a signal, the structure of what was there readable beneath what covered it. The erasing is visible as process. This is not concealment. It is transformation: the face has become landscape, and from that ground, in the space where the attention was directed and extracted, one flower.
A white anemone, blue-edged, on a green stem. It is simply there, in the place where a face was, having replaced what this series has always replaced, but here the replacement is literal and its process is visible. The face was painted. Then it was erased. Then the flower arrived.
Across the horizontal, an impasto ridge of blue, dark, and pink, paint poured and allowed to find its own path, coral or root system or the kind of structure that grows rather than is built. Below it, the lower register holds raw canvas, black marks, the pink and blue matter continuing its movement into unresolved ground.
On the right, deep orange/red descending, the colour of the broadcast signal, the heat of the attention economy, the urgency of the face that was there before the falling.