Stil stuck
2001 - Present
Description
A vertical painting dominated by blues, with a half-length figure in the lower left foreground seen in profile, facing right and cropped by the bottom and left edges.
The head sits at the mid-left of the canvas. One raised hand enters from the lower center, fingers curled, holding a lit cigarette at about the horizontal midline. Thin white smoke rises from the tip in loose looping curves toward the upper right.
Behind the figure the composition divides. On the left, blocky tan and ochre building masses with small dark windows rise from the lower left and step down toward the center. The center opens onto a horizontal band of water in graded blues with white horizontal highlights, meeting a pale horizon in the upper middle. Above, the sky moves from cream and light blue on the left to denser grey-blue at the upper right, scattered with small white V-shaped bird marks across the upper left. The right half holds ranks of damaged multi-storey structures in grey-blue and slate, with broken roofs, empty window openings, and heaped rubble running down the right edge. A small dark standing figure with a short cast shadow occupies the open light-blue ground at the lower right of center. In the upper right, pale translucent rounded white shapes with small dark dots overlap the misty skyline.
Cerulean, cobalt, slate, and pale ice-blue dominate, set against a limited warm range of tan, ochre, and brown in the left-hand buildings, with warm skin tones and black hair in the foreground figure, who wears a dark navy collared garment with lighter blue highlights along the folds. Application is smooth and largely blended, with soft gradients in the sky, water, and mist, while the figure, hair, and hand are crisp and hard-edged by comparison. Hair is painted as flat black masses with sharp contour notches. Smoke is drawn in fine continuous white line strokes. The rubble is built from short angular strokes and darker scumbled passages. The surface is matte with minimal impasto. No signature, date, or inscription is visible.
Artist Notes
It expresses the intersection of past and present the young man’s eyes are divided between rubble and destruction on one side, and memory hope, and the blue horizon on the other
Preservation Notes
PROVISIONAL. All observations below are from visual inspection of a digital image. No physical examination has been carried out. DIMENSIONS Recorded as 90 x 70 with no unit set, the largest in the collection. The unit field is empty on this record and on all eight works in this collection. Not inferred. Requires confirmation. MEDIUM Recorded as "canvas", which names the support rather than the medium. Visual inspection shows smooth, largely blended opaque paint with soft gradients and minimal impasto, consistent with oil or acrylic. The medium itself is unrecorded. TITLE Recorded as "Stil stuck". This may be the title as the artist gave it, or it may be a transcription slip for "Still stuck". Titles are recorded as the artist gave them and this one has not been altered. One check against the source would settle it. SIGNATURE No signature, date, or inscription is visible on the surface. Three works in this collection are unsigned: this work, Before the Absence, and The Divided Soul. Worth confirming whether these were signed on the reverse or left unsigned. DATE Recorded as 2026, the most recent in the collection along with The Divided Soul. No inscribed date on the surface to corroborate it. SOURCE FILE 1118 x 1691 px, a low-resolution file for a work of this size. Aspect ratio only. Physical dimensions not derivable from the file. A higher-resolution capture would be worth requesting while it is possible, both for condition recording and for any future reproduction.
