Self-portrait (Dead)/ Possession /Death and the Abbot Each of these paintings depicts elements from the Dance of Death terracotta figures made in Germany by Anton Sohn, in the early 19th century, which in turn were based on medieval wood-cuts of the same subject. He is interested in their direct depiction of death; in a sense death made visual. Ideas of death have always been present in my work, but comparative to these paintings somehow hidden ‘Self-portrait (Dead)’ is based on a detail taken from one of the dance of death figures. The idea of it as a self-portrait, representing myself as a dead figure, hints at painting’s ability to outlive its creator. The painting was inspired by a number of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, in particular ‘Self-Portrait with Pipe and Straw Hat’ (1888), as his image has become synonymous with the way he depicted himself at different stages in his life In ‘Death and The Abbot’ a ‘Dance of Death’ terracotta is painted at a larger scale (than in previous works), causing the figures to have greater and more animated presence in space, and as it is encountered by the view‘Possession’ is a collage of four separate ‘Dance of Death’ skeletal figures, surrounding a ‘maiden’. In the original terracottas the figure being ‘collected by death’, is usually represented with a single skeleton. The intensity, violence and aggression of the image is increased through the addition of more skeletal figures. The figures across the canvas form a cross shape with the waterfall acting as the horizontal. I see the use of waterfall images in this and other of my paintings as having a number of possible interpretations. In James Elkins book ‘Pictures and Tears’ he writes of a painting by an anonymous artist called the Nachi Waterfall, from the late thirteenth century. A person had written to him saying that a few people claimed that the painting was ‘God’, and that she had witnessed people crying in front of it: “There was a crowd of people four or five deep pressed up against the glass wall in front of the painting, and pressed up against each other, all of them gazing in silence at the painting and almost all of them weeping”. Taking this idea into account I am most interested in the waterfall as something to evoke or as symbol of emotion. As with ‘Gathering Evidence’ the waterfall can also be seen to have a sexual connotation, in this instance the number of skeletons surrounding the single woman, can also be seen to speak of a sexual aggression