Flower Power features a photo of an 18-year-old actor named George Harris, placing carnations into the barrel of a soldier’s rifle during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in front of the Pentagon in 1967 where around 100,000 protestors had gathered to oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

I have taken a few liberties with the colour and composition, preferring yet again a vertical over a horizontal orientation as well as using ochres and pinky flesh tones that approximate a retouched photo of the time (the original is in black and white). As with other works, I have projected the image onto a matrix of hand-painted circles. Only the silhouette was traced, the circles continue on either side of this representational border. Inside each of these two opposing colour fields of figure and ground is a coloured abstraction of the original content. One lovely surprise is the soldier’s hand trying to remove the flowers from the gun – the gun has been rendered according to where it intersects with the matrix, causing the normally straight gun-barrel to droop. Sometimes impotence is bliss.