For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to men in suits. Often, when I put pen to paper, little caricatures would emerge, always dressed in a suit and tie. It seems to be happening with my sculpture too. I begin with a vague idea of who I might construct, and if it's a guy, he always ends up suited, (this one was supposed to be naked.)
I read somewhere recently that people with red hair would eventually disappear. It turned out to be a furphy, but when I found the orange haystack that became his hair, I began to piece together who he was and what he represented.
He's a bit of a 70's guy. Sideburns, Dennis Lillee moustache and he's wearing the mission brown suit. He's fallen over (or was he pushed for being so outdated?) and is struggling to get back up. He looks scared, humiliated, alone. I feel a bit sorry for him, but he really is redundant.
Like the plastic he is constructed from, he is no longer necessary and has been cast aside, like his suit, his hair.
I am led to believe, and I could be the gullible recipient of a great story, that the colour "Mission Brown" so popular in the 1970's, but abhorred today, came about by the mixing of a number of tins of coloured paints that had been donated to a Christian mission looking to paint their mission buildings. I like the idea that his suit is the colour derived from this use of leftover, or waste resources. He's my kind of guy.
