Following on from painting ‘Unhappy’ I was in the studio and feeling the emotion and chose to make an abstract painting using the same palette and riding that wave. The small 30x10cm painting that followed felt very visceral and energised being created in that precise moment. It holds all those mixed and often contagious anxieties found in the previous painting but far more raw in execution. Bold colours applied thickly with the palette knife, scratched and forced onto the canvas, lines scrapped into the thick impasto with more than a passing glance to Dante’s Inferno.
Michael Palmer 