It all started with visit to the Marché Arabe in Fréjus. On a stall selling feminine Muslim garments lay a slender package depicting a very flat image of a woman wearing a head covering with the title. ‘True Love Muslim Articles’ - conflicting semiotics or what?
Well that was it. Awaiting the right moment for retrieval, an image of an attractive young lady printed on a ‘point of sale’ display card for a brand of pub nibbles had been in storage in my studios since the mid 1970’s. By intimating she might remove her T-shirt, ‘Big D’ was there to encourage the purchase of salt peanuts. Besides this emotive graphic, I unearthed my original art work for a Christmas card of the same period reflecting on consumerism at Christmas time - a link between all three images was evident.
Womanhood, whether seen as partially covered or partially revealed, can so easily stimulate the male imagination. That was the single idea that sparked off this artwork; three graphic representations with reference to two sometimes conflicting cultures.
From this starting point, it was a question of integrating these three quite different and independent images into an artistic whole. The size of the three images is effectively the same, I analyzed the most prominent colours in the three images, reproduced them in oil paint which I inserted into small plastic bags. In this way, the packets of peanuts, originally adorning the central figure, had become transparent containers working as metaphors for individual seeds combining to create an entity - the starting point for reproduction and creativity.
What might have started as ‘True Love Muslim Articles’ had now become ‘True Love Articles’ produced by and for people of whatever faith.
