In 1938 Salvador Dali created the lobster phone for the English poet and art collector Edward James. Ultimately Dali created eleven of these that James distributed around his two houses. Like with many surrealist objects the question of why remains. Perhaps James made very short calls as I can’t imagine the lobster was a comfortable object to hold. But it was and still is an extraordinary object demanding our attention.

I would have thought the phone itself in the 1930’s would have been an impactful object, particularly when it rang. Perhaps it is testimony to not just Dali but Edward James’s desire to go beyond the telephone which was only just being accepted as a household item.

The placement of two unrelated objects, perhaps one is ordinary and the other a little more strange disturbs our rational brain and it’s this disturbance that is at the same time captivating. It makes us question how things are, how things should be. It pulls the rug out from under us.

In this painting I’ve utilised my “Smart Phone” or “Mobile Phone”, the film noir phone placed on top of a tortoise and given it a surrealist twist with Dali’s lobster on top. Perhaps it wasn’t so much an accident as an inevitability. I’ve always felt my paintings have stayed on the edge of the possible, a very fine edge but nevertheless I’d always described myself as a realist but as I’m getting older those boundaries seem ready to be stretched.