Courcoux & Courcoux - Charlesworth

I Died Every Night
Acrylic on canvas	30" x 20"	SOLD

At Easter 1984, whilst recovering from an illness at my parents' house, I had the experience for about a week of being drawn around about daybreak into a narcoleptic vortex that seemed a kind of death. Sleep and death are mysteries that seem to me bound together anyway and during this particular week, when otherwise I was as strong as a lion, the two seemed to become one -- though, of course, I didn't really die.

This painting had two makeovers after its original completion in 1992 and it was only after the second of these that I associated the imagery in it with the Easter of 1984, at first poetically and then more factually. The compartment at the top of the picture might be states of sleep beyond dreaming, whilst the contorted semi-abstract figure on the beach represents psychic pain.