Formerly called '3 Heads', I renamed this drawing some time ago as it seemed that no-one grasped my own motivations for making the image. Other interpretations of my work seldom bother me anymore, as I have come to realize that it is in the nature of the human mind to be various, to be adapted by its circumstances, as the race itself is, leading to conflicting perceptions about just about everything. Other people's outlooks are not merely a matter of opinion or of point of view: simply, no-one else sees like me, and one of the great struggles of my life has been to understand others and grasp how they can be motivated so differently.
This drawing springs from two sources: my initial religious upbringing and then later, my coming to see mankind as an evolved organism. I have, therefore, a need, bred into me when I was a child, to find meaning and wholeness, these things associated in my mind with the unities of the religious experience. Yes, we might even disagree about that. Later, it was to be the sense of our status as evolved beings that dominated my reflections on the human experience, and it is this foundation that lies at the root of this drawing.
At the time of drawing the image, I was interested in the sense I had of the emergent human being as we know him/her. Our 'humanity' as self-conscious beings, possessing a consciousness that evidences empathy, undefinables like love and even a sense of beauty. This Being, this supreme maker, both creative and destructive, is at the heart of this drawing. My focus was on a being that initially emerges, say, from its ape ancestry, and then goes on to emerge again, or to deviate from, the earlier homo erectus.
So, I hoped, in the drawing, to offer a central figure with the eyes of a fully developed human being, as we know him/her. Enlightened and reflective, this figure is meant to be the highly complex seer of the three figures, with a mind behind those eyes capable of the most astonishing perceptual gymnastics. This central figure is contrasted with two outer ones, both closer to something brutish, transactional in how they look and see the world. But as three heads, joined together in the drawing, also perhaps all one. Hence a certain sadness in the eyes of the central head, a sadness that may also relect a sense of the trauma of consciousness.
Charcoal drawn on cartridge paper,