Rolf Harris
Lifelong Friends
Limited edition giclee on canvas of 395 copies + 59 Artist Proof Copies
Image size: 18.75" x 30"
Image comes slipped by the publisher in original box, complete with certificate of authenticity
Released: Autumn 2004
From the Rolf Harris Tour Brochure:
In the 70's I owned a nightclub in Bugiba in the St Paul's Bay area of Malta. Just along the road from where we were living were a row of houses facing the open fields of a farm. These two very dear friends lived in adjacent houses in this row. They had grown up together as children and had lived there all their lives. Seeing them sitting side by side, in the blinding Malta sunlight on the stone wall outside their homes, looking across to the farmland they had worked all their lives, you could tell they were the very salt of the earth. At some stage someone had daubed an anti-Mintoff slogan on their roughly rendered stone wall, and no amount of whitewashing seemed to have been able to blank it out.
To tackle the wall in this painting I used the technique that I learned while creating my version of L.S.Lowry's 'Coming From The Mill', This time, I used flake white oil paint and not acrylic, and waited until it dried. I used it to create a jagged background, but only in the area where the wall surface would be. It gives that marvellous random effect of the rough stone work. I particularly like the way the blinding white sunlight on the white shirt disappears into the white of the wall with no discernable edge.
