Oil on board

... Rodin's & Delacroix's ‘Three Shades’ burying Belle Pecorini and Monica Quirk.
Inscribed: Lovers derived from Rodin’s Three Shades. Also the lost souls clinging to The Barque of Danté by Delacroix.

“You Offer Me a Dead Rose, May I Give You a Dead Rat? was one of the few images in his fifth project Love & Mediocrity which was painted directly from life rather than in the ‘private language’ allegorical style he mainly deployed in this Project.

… Many of the ideas behind the paintings in these Projects dealt with the theme of love or the falling-in-love process and the consequences of the breakdown of a relationship, which he saw as a kind of putrefaction, aptly illustrated by the dead rat, a medieval symbol of decay and the passing of time.