Kyp Finnegan’s Conker, Phil Cooper, 40cm x 40cm, acrylic on board
It gives me great pleasure to share the first of Berlin-based artist, Phil Cooper’s new paintings inspired by the world of Chimera. As each new episode of the audiobook goes live, a further painting will follow here at Red’s Kingdom. One of the most exciting aspects of collaborating with other creatives is the way in which your own work is vivified by the imagination and talents of other people. To hear actor Dan Snelgrove inhabiting the different characters of Chimera has been an addictive delight for me, and it’s no different each time Phil Cooper sends a new painting my way. I’m asking Phil to contribute a few words as preface to each painting, and so….
In the opening chapter we find ourselves in the mundane world; the back of a car, rain, and a family where there’s a ‘bit of an atmosphere’. Familiar stuff to most of us, probably. But by the end of chapter two we’ve entered another world entirely, we pass through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, the back of the wardrobe. Somehow Kyp has stepped through a portal to another world, a world full of wonders and terrors, a very long way from the back seat of a car in a rainy street.
So with this first image I wanted to get a sense of the portal from one world to another. The portal itself can’t be identified precisely, but once through it, there’s no going back. In the image, Kyp, and the mundane world he is leaving, are represented by the conker in his pocket. The conker is passing through a swirling ‘no-place’, the bridge between the world he was rejecting and the place where his feelings were unintentionally sending him. Colour is heightened, everything is moving, swirling round, being drawn inescapably into the universe of Chimera…
Red's Kingdom 
Those wonderful greens seem to be turning up a lot lately. The world must need them. (K)
LikeLiked by 1 person