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Shaun Tan - "Never Ask For A Reason" - oil on canvas
Never Ask For A Reason
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")
"A fight, a sudden, violent climax. The boys are animated yet surrounded by passive spectators, creatures standing still like puppets without masters. The resemblance to a campfire in a deep black night is intentional: an immediate feeling of heat, a following feeling of isolation in a silent wilderness."
"I’ve often looked at a Goya painting of giants buried knee-deep in a landscape swinging clubs at each other, deadlocked in eternal, pointless battle, the meaning of which is unclear. Images of small figures fighting in vast, strange landscapes also feel biblical, or more broadly, mythological."
"Here, all the entities from previous adventures have come to observe the conflict in a kind of bewildered silence. In earlier sketches I had the various creatures falling apart or walking away, as if the magic of a shared imagination has dissolved, but I felt there was something too obvious about this. I preferred a more subtle sense of playfellows fading from reality, all the desaturated to the same brownish hue, weakly illuminated within a greater enveloping darkness. The game is coming undone." —Shaun Tan