A Bugseye View

• A Bug’s Eye View of
• Tweety Bird
• Searching for his Long-lost Grape-grandfather
• Among the Bright Lights of the Ruinous Walking-stick Candy City
• 48” x 42”, acrylic on stretched canvas, 1995

I relate to my “Tweety Bird” painting as a frozen snapshot of a New York fairy-tale for children. For me, what you have is a bug looking up into New York City and what you see is only what the bug sees. You have the “once upon a time…” of a fairy tale in the top left and top right corners. You have Tweety Bird in the middle at the top – he’s trying to find his grape-grandfather who is just below him swinging across the city in a hammock eating grapes.

The buildings in black and blue on either side of the painting represent New York. On the left you have a ladder to the stars, like in Peter Pan. And through the middle of the painting a piece of walking-stick candy. At the bottom you have ripe and ripening grapes. – above that you can see the guy in the hammock (he knows which grapes are ripe and which ones aren’t). Also, at the bottom you have three Dutch irises – two halves on either side and a whole one in the middle – cos that’s what the bug saw.

I painted this painting to celebrate the lives of my mother, Liekje, and my wife, Joan; both contracted Hodgkins disease, (throat cancer), at the same age – 18!!

Mum died in September 1958, aged 26… Joan died in July 1992, aged 42.

May they both rest in peace…