I never plan what I will paint for the coming year. I just wait, I wait for my heart to tell me. I know when it speaks and I know that the artwork that I will create will be a real, authentic and emotional realism portrait. It will be an image that burns.
I knew that I had to paint this painting whilst I walked around the factories in the port of Dhaka in Bangladesh. I was transferred into victorian times. I saw factories that were crumbling and boiling over with the intense heat as the workers inside suffocated under the heat and the pressure to produce and keep producing. I saw young and old with the same look in their eyes as if they had just seen hell. The conditions were terrifying yet somewhere in the west a business owner was getting rich from the toil of these people. The shareholders of the company were scraping at the hot and leathered skin of these people with their sharp fingernails.
I could not understand this wealth gap and how this gap widens. I cannot understand how greed and power are the gods that some people pray to whilst empathy and kindness are buried deep underground.
I wanted to create a painting where the workers hit back, the business owners are jailed for their crimes against humanity. This is “Karma”. I wanted to paint the man in an hyperrealism way. I wanted every tiny detail to matter so I used tiny brushes to paint every skin pore, every hair. I owed it to this guy.
I hope that you see a painting that screams as the heavy iron chains rattle.
