Mike Thorpe

A Sour Sky

Home.

Two days into lockdown.

It hits like a hammer, pounding the bones.

The battery runs into the red as energy saps from the body.

It takes its toll.

A small, white bedroom table for a studio; carefully made plans shelved for safer times.

Ennui inhabits every pore, feeding a melancholy, which dulls the creative impulse and arrests momentum.

Torpor.

It grips and we become cast as if in a movie but the script is no longer ours.

Hues of familiar skies and structures, once muted, take on a sourness. This unseen threat – this toxic fallout – renders a bitter underpainting which tints the way we see.

A strange mood inhabits the paintings; the stillness of forms bathed in a strange light, casting long, stalking shadows.

And always beneath the surface, the sense of the unknown.

We colour our own surroundings with what we feel, what we suspect and what we do not yet understand.