"Portrait of David"

“Portrait of David”

Kerry Wright, 1992

Oils on Canvas

60cm x 50cm (24in x 20in)

This portrait of my friend, David, was painted during a particularly turbulent period of my life. My mother had died the previous November and an all-enveloping cloud of deepest mourning and grief had descended upon me. I had been very close to my mother and I felt her loss acutely. Incomprehensibly, into my disconsolate state at that time swaggered David’s immutably laconic presence. We first met through a mutual friend in early 1991, not long after Mum had been diagnosed with inoperable, terminal cancer. I was in a deep state of despair, though I managed to function cheerfully when in my mother’s company and we had many happy times together in the final months of her life. David was everything that I was not. He worked as a tradesman and was from Sydney’s outer western suburbs. He was nine years my junior. He was confident in a cocky sort of way, with a decidedly contagious joie de vivre about him. He was a tonic. But there was also a dark side to his personality. On the night I painted his portrait, he gave me a small piece of blotting paper with a little printed image of a robot on it. I didn’t know what it was, but he assured me it would lift my spirits. “Put it on your tongue and let it dissolve,” David told me. I knew nothing of drugs. For a man in his forties, I was decidedly naïve about them. So when the LSD began to seize me, I had no idea what was happening. Initially I slunk into a corner and stared into space. But then, for no conceivable reason, I rushed to my easel, grabbed some paints and brushes, and started to paint David’s portrait. David soon grew tired of such esoteric pursuits and departed, leaving me to finish the portrait alone, working on into the wee small hours of the night with a manic intensity. I never really have fully recovered from my beloved mother’s death. I was sitting by her bed, holding her hand, at the moment of her death. And I know that she will be sitting by my bed, holding my hand, when my turn comes. David’s portrait presently hangs in his home in Sydney, Australia.