Self portrait as Steve Austin the six million dollar manabstract painting of nightmares

For a few years now, I have been beset by the most intense nightmares. This abstract painting is part of a series of paintings that deal with this intense subject. You can see all the others here.

My usual abstract art is totally abstract; I hide extremely complex and intense passages in amongst the paint. The human eye sees different things depending on the distance from the painting. For this painting, I moved away from total abstraction; this is because I intended to enter this into one of Australia’s most prestigious art prizes – the Archibald Prize.

The title of the painting gives a clue to the nature of the painting; Self Portrait as Steve Austin The Six Million Dollar Man. It’s about the rebuilding of a human after a terrible injury. The metaphor here being that I was slowly recovering from the nightmares I had been suffering. They were less frequent and a lot less intense.

For many of us older people, we will remember the start of The Six Million Dollar Man television show. It featured Steve’s accident, how they rebuilt him and the result – he was much more capable. I feel the same way. Oh, and all that red? That’s a reference to Steve Austin’s red tracksuit. And it also is a color associated with horror.

This painting is an exquisite abstract painting and I am pretty stoked with it.