Symbology

< THING >

Thing - a trusty companion on my sojourns into the surreal realm - is a calm and peaceful entity that inhabits a body of stone. Thing is loyal and trustworthy and is always there to share in the moments of profundity which would otherwise only be experienced in pure solitude.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< MEHNT >

Symbol for mind, symbol for mountain, Mehnt is the mountain mind that is cast in solidity. As cold as granite caressed by mountain streams after the spring thaw. Where there is the fossilized dragon, there is Mehnt. Crystalline, cold, pure, serene, solitary, everlasting and omnipresent is the Mehnt.

It is the destruction of me, and therefore it is the creation of me. It is the beginning and the end. Every thing must have an end in order to have a beginning, and there is no thing without an end or beginning. Only everything is without beginning or end, and therefore everything is nothing. And within the Mehnt, this paradox is enclosed. And, I, with it - for my existence is the ultimate paradox.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< BLUE AND GREEN >

Green and blue are colors which you will find to be quite predominant in a lot of my paintings. In fact, one might say that I have some form of unhealthy obsession with these colors. You will also often find these colors accompanied by a smaller amount of either yellow or gold, and to a lesser degree sometimes, silver or grey.

Blue and green are the primary colors of earth - blue representing sea and sky, and green representing the vegetation that adorns the face of our earth. The yellow or gold is symbolic of the radiant sun. Green and blue are very powerful symbols of life, growth, and beauty. It is for these reasons that I am almost religious about these colors.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< THE HAND >

The hand is a symbol which is especially prevalent in my early drawings, even before I started signing my artworks with the nom de ploem Tom Kidding.

The hand is a powerful implement - the most important tool with which we manipulate our external environment. With the aid of our mostly unappreciated hands, we do all sorts of wonderful things - like painting, writing, sculpting, preparing food, making music, punching out our enemies, stuffing gobs of food into our mouths, steering our cars (and thus preventing many head-on collisions), scratching those hard to reach itches in the furthest extremities of our bodies, making rude signs at motorists that pull out right in front of us, wiping our butts, holding hands with a loved one, and yes, even masturbating.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< TABLE MOUNTAIN >

Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, the magnificent Table Mountain made a huge impression on me. So much so, that it made its way as a symbol into a great number of my artworks. Table Mountain stands tall and proud, seemingly protecting and watching over Cape Town, just as the mighty Sphinx guards over the great pyramids of Egypt.

Prone to creative flights of fancy, I would on occasion entertain the notion that under the rocky crust of this great stone beast lay conceiled the fossilized remains of a colossal reclining dragon. This idea is explored in the painting "Journey - Dawn of Enlightenment" and the drawing "Monu-Mehnt".

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< TABLE MOUNTAIN FLAG >

As a further step towards formalizing the use of Table Mountain as a symbol in my artworks, I started playing around with the idea of incorporating it into flag designs. I tried out a few different treatments on this theme, in some cases representing the mountain with three-dimensional shading while in other cases trying a more abstract representation. In paintings, the mountain would be coupled together with the colors blue and green in order to consolidate these personally important symbols into one official form.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< SQUIRREL >

I've always been quite fond of squirrels. South Africa's Cape Town Gardens, like many public park areas in major cities, is host to a large population of rather tame and fearless squirrels that think nothing of approaching complete strangers to retrieve the offerings of nutty deliciousness.

For squirrels to have made such an impression on me, I can only imagine that my mother must have taken me to the Cape Town Gardens as a very young child and let me feed the squirrels. Having been back there many times throughout the years, I've seen the thoroughly uninhibited delight of young toddlers being approached by these lovable rodents. For a youngster that age, a creature the size of a squirrel would seem like a dog the size of a Great Dane to an adult.

By their mannerisms, squirrels appear to possess a rather inquisitive nature - constantly gathering and storing food reserves. In my artworks, squirrels are often used as a symbol of curiosity, particularly well illustrated in the paintings "Clandestine Colours" and "Enticing Mysteries". I also perhaps relate well to squirrels because their industrious foraging activities can be likened to the process of gathering and storing ideas for later use that typifies my approach to art.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >  

< DOVE >

The symbol of the dove is quite similar to the symbol of the squirrel. In fact, the two almost always appears alongside one another in an artwork. That said, however, the dove tends to represent a slightly different kind of energy to that of the squirrel. For me, the dove embodies peace and tranquility - a kind of comfortably mindless disaffectedness that seems almost to be an ideal state to attain. In works where the dove and squirrel appear together, the dove usually plays the role of witness or passive bystander, while the squirrel - on the other hand - takes on a more active role.

I make the distinction between doves and pigeons, although many people often confuse the two. Pigeons are somewhat maligned, having the reputation of being the cockroaches of the bird kingdom. While common pigeons tend to be excessively rowdy and forward with humans (bringing to mind Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds"), doves retain some of their grace and dignity by being somewhat more shy - almost a little skittish even.

  LOAD THUMBNAILS >