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Shaun Tan - "Never Eat the Last Olive at a Party" - oil on canvas
Never Eat the Last Olive at a Party
Oil on canvas by Shaun Tan (2012).
Artwork size: 86 x 76 cm (33.9" x 29.9")
Frame size: 88.5 x 78.5 x 4.7 cm (34.8" x 30.9" x 1.9")
"This is a scene I’ve been sketching for some years, and probably has something to do with a personal anxiety about formal parties. I was particularly moved to paint it after attending the Oscars in 2011, the year our short film ‘The Lost Thing’ received an award. In LA I frequently had the strong feeling of being completely out of place and worrying about social mistakes, even though the environment was fascinating and exciting. The atmosphere in this painting is inviting too, but it’s also intensely claustrophobic, and the stillness of the falcons – like the rabbit – suggests the possibility of sudden violence. Like most of the pictures in the book there are these internal tensions between things that are pleasurable and painful, bright and dark, funny and sombre, and these opposites typically guide all of my image development."
"The brightness of the table and plates is inviting, and I wanted to paint them to look ‘delicious’ even though they are empty. I also spent a lot of time trying to get the background lighting right, a kind of smoky, sparkling recession into a possibly infinite ballroom. The eyes of the falcons are the blackest parts, reflecting the lights of the room with a crystalline sharpness. I did not want to anthropomorphize the falcons too much (an earlier sketch had them holding wine glasses which I later removed), I like the way these birds naturally look, not particularly evil or calculating. As with many animals, it’s just impossible to know what they are thinking, a mystery I find always alluring. They remind me of barristers in a courtroom (from my one experience of jury duty) silently passing judgement, enjoying a certain superiority and contemplating when best to strike; a little inspiration here also came from 19th century French artist Honore Daumier’s satirical paintings of lawyers and other contemporaries in high office." —Shaun Tan