Hydra Horsey (Finishing Touches)

I'd not been happy with the upper background section of this painting since I painted it in 2019. So I've just got round to changing it. Like a lot of my recent oil paintings, this one was painted quite quickly, and without any preliminary sketches (just painted straight onto the canvas, sketching the image with paint brushes as I went), so I didn't want to overwork the touching up. One of the problems of returning to a piece of work that was originally executed in a very intuitive state of mind is trying to get back into the flow of that, especially when returning to it some years later. The retouching ended up not exactly as I pictured it (the colours are right but I'd imagined it more as a few simple brush strokes), but it's close enough that I'm happy to now leave it as it is. As the quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci goes, 'Art is never finished, only abandoned'.

'Hydra Horsey', 2019-2023, oil on canvas, by Wayne Chisnall

Here's a bit about the painting that I'd written in a previous post -

This painting that I did from memory turned out a bit more sinister-looking than originally intended (quelle surprise). It's inspired by something that I saw when I went to see a school play with my brother, in which my nephew was performing. The play was a mash-up of various Greek myths and in it the Hydra, a multi-headed serpentine monster, was played by a group of kids, all of which were clad in black with black tights on their heads. After the play I was standing outside with my brother whilst the cast of the play was running around the playing field, full of post-performance excitement. Whilst chatting with my brother I noticed in the distance, two of the Hydra heads from the play were on all fours and giving rides to a couple of even smaller kids, who were using the legs from the tights as reins. It was a bizarre and funny sight, and I remember thinking at the time that I must do a painting of this.

I posted some photos of the painting on social media, during the various stages of completion, and received a few comments from people likening the rider figure to that of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. This wasn't initially intentional but I guess that there's often a lot of things going on subconsciously, and when you make artwork it's sometimes hard to block out all the external influences that one gets bombarded by. But that's also the beauty of art; it's a language with multiple readings and constructed from layers of diverse thoughts and ideas. The process of creating art is one of constant discovery, where each brush stroke or unintentional mark can suggest an alternate direction. I'm pretty sure that the children I saw on the playing field that day were girls (although they were quite far away in the distance) and when I started the painting the figure of the rider I wasn't sure what gender it was going to be. All I knew was that it was going to have a mop of blond hair. Maybe the Trump/Johnson comments influenced the direction of gender or maybe the work had already decided the direction.