The image used for this Advent Retreat is a painting called ‘Poster Girl’ by the Scottish artist Angus McEwan. Angus is a master of watercolour who has won prizes all over the world. He is the President of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW). Click here to visit his website.
Angus wrote this about the painting:
This was originally discovered on a trip to Bologna while teaching a workshop. I had been to Bologna before and was keen to discover some new material in the city. It just so happened that this billboard was discovered beside our parked car. Over the years, I have produced a few paintings which have used ripped posters or billboards as a subject matter. I especially like how the random collection of words or images can almost hint or create their own story through a loose association of proximity.
For me the act of peeling and removing the various layers of billboard posters through time is a metaphor for the way words, thoughts or ideas can be stripped away and lost as they fade from consciousness. In the current political environments of several countries, the truth is very often lost or questioned to the point that it is difficult to figure out fact from fiction. I believe there has been a conscious act of muddying the waters by many, to make the general populace no longer trust the media when it comes to getting their information. When that happens, real news can be indistinguishable from stories used as propaganda or for the purpose of hiding real information amongst nonsense stories, so they are dismissed out of hand.
Hiding messages or codes in the bulletin board or random associations, we can see patterns where none exist, or is there information hinting at something? End of an Era, the power and control of religion over people’s lives, the print media, communication methods or the impact of man on the planet?