TANTALUS BEEHIVE

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acrylic painting on canvas - 1975 - 28 x 20 inches - roughly 71 x 51 cm

This is one of my early works - I just noticed I had never before posted it anywhere, not even in my “Werkverzeichnis” (catalogue raisonné) - something I should correct and perhaps check for more “missing” items.
It was created 2 years before I entered the Art Department at the University of Lethbridge. It must be said that this period around the mid-seventies was my most prolific. Even though I worked at that time for the Canadian Pacific Railway, I scheduled my runs in such a way that I had at least a week off each month to just paint! It is one of the few images from that time in my digital files, scanned from a slide. There are some more, and I think I may also post these soon. But just the tip of the iceberg, since I had “lost” most of my work from that time without a record, many of them were sold in Canada and the USA through my gallerist in Lethbridge.

I sort of had a strange streak going in those days - if the ordeal of Tantalus was not enough, I had bees nesting in his mouth too. That the image resembles Darwin (with a transparent scull) is just another tongue-in-cheek quirk of mine.

You tell me what it could mean, I have to admit, I forgot - but remember, there is no logic in Surrealism, one of the definitions:

"beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella"
by Comte de Lautréamont in his novel
Les Chants de Maldoror

And googling that phrase again, I find this music video: Nurse with Wound Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table. (Full Album) - (do you have time to listen for 1 hr 17 min?)

Anyway, I jump from one thing to another, and if someone could explain how my mind works, I would be thankful.