For this painting I decided to use a black background to create a dreamlike and disjointed appearance. I wanted the objects in the room to appear unanchored, seeming to float in the space, separate from the surrounding walls and floor.
I also wanted the background to have a tonal, slightly scratched appearance, and to acheive this I first painted the card black, before adding dry white paint with a rough brush for a slightly textured appearance.
I wanted to create a confusing sense of pespective within the space, and so added corners to the walls in a unrealistic places, for example adding a protruding angle in the centre where the two rooms would normally be separated by a parallel wall.
I also decided to make the space abstract and ambiguous with my use of bold white lines indicating the edges of the walls. This style was inspired by the bold linear, and often cagelike structures frequently featured in the works of Francis Bacon, which I studied for my dissertaton. The idea of these structures is that they flatten pictorial space, making it confusing and threatening.
This was also my aim for this picture; hence its title.
I used the same chairs for this composition as I included in Crooked Chairs, as I thought they had a striking appearance, in particular the rocking chair in the foreground. I used waterbased oils for the chairs to give them a more fluid appearance, using bold colours to make them contrast from and appear to glow alluringly yet ominously against the dark background.
The lampshade was added from an image found on the internet, as unfortunately I had no available suitable lamps to refer to. My original idea was to add a very contemporary lampshade to go with the painting’s futuristic appearance, but when i found this ‘shirt lamp’ on the internet i loved its strange, ‘melting’ appearance of decay, thinking that it went very well with my theme of unreality, and had to add it to my composition.
I would like to expand Maze further into a panoramic picture, making the composition more complex and adding more interior elements, such as an incomplete staircase.
