Scott Elk
Desire Lines - Brad & Troy, 2022
Oil on board
93cm x 227cm

This painting is about the mixing and combining of body parts in a moment of passion. The new fleshy composition starts drifting, fragmenting, and moving at times into a monumental topographic landscape.

Inspiration for this composition comes from Jenny Saville’s Fulcrum, 1999. Although I started with a similar colour palette, I eventually moved away wishing to push the blue, and orange complimentary contrast, drawing closer to Brett Whiteley’s 1973 paintings with that deep marine blue used to capture Sydney Harbour. I felt a strong need to interrupt this painting visually which I kept doing repeatedly throughout the painting process hoping to capture more than just physical bodies, but the energy that is moving rhythmically before and after this specific moment. The phallic, three necked vessel could be considered a visual metaphor, and is a link to my ceramic practise. The actual object, although looking like its depiction here in the painting before the final glaze firing, totally collapsed in the kiln, ripping apart, and melting into a mess of parts, similar now to the left side of the painting.

Desire Lines

The majority of work produced in 2022 falls into my Desire Lines series of paintings, drawings, screenprints, and ceramics. The series is about relationship to place, connection to people, and the sometimes intoxicating, head-fucking connection of physical interaction.

A desire line, is a term often referred to in urban or transportation planning, as a path created as a consequence of human traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. It is the way taken by choice, by desire, and by necessity when following the heart. It is movement with intention.

In a real world practical application, the desire lines have the possibility to connect people resulting in events along a time line. I see people as these spinning vortexes of energy, in a positive sense like galaxies spinning and reaching out, and in contrast, negatively sucking everything towards themselves like black holes spinning. When two of these things collide, wondrous and unexpected things can happen; colours swirl, planets could be flung out of orbit, or set in a new orbit, momentarily or until the end of time. My interpretation of these desire lines is constantly searching to insert the human element of connection into fragmented, and abstracted forms.