Sometimes titles come easily, sometimes they might come before the painting, during the painting or a long way after the painting is finished. This is one of the latter.

Painting it was a wonderful exploration of balancing colour and form. And so I began to think of a title in those terms but of course as soon as you start to put boundaries up to define something you find yourself inevitably trying to wiggle under the fence you just constructed.

I began with the idea of a limited palette which led to a controlled palette which led to “The Control Room” and now as the world seems to have quickly spiralled from a mere toe-dipping in to the world of AI and other global troubles and calamities I can’t help thinking that “The Control Room” reaches beyond the formal compositional elements of a painting.

Control is often accompanied by chaos and at the risk of showing my age, memories of the 1960’s comedy TV series, “Get Smart”, with Maxwell Smart (Agent 86) and his female partner (Agent 99) working for CONTROL fighting against KAOS, “the international organisation of evil” comes to mind. Is it possible that 60 years later this parody has become a reality? It’s an irresistible thought that if we lowered the “cone of silence” over this zebra and flamingo we might get more sensible ideas for world order than we have at the moment.

But aside from these wry musings the painting is deceptively quiet with its balance of pinks, black and white with flashes of silver and gold spoons. Touches of red on the finches lead your eye through a triangle to the finch on top of the Major Mitchell parrot. The three strings then create a curve through the painting, perhaps not a perfect hyperbola but is suggestive of the tradition of mathematics in painting to provide structure and harmony.