'Mid Life Crisis' oil & acrylic on canvas
The milkbar down the road from my childhood home had only one stand-up arcade game: Wonder Boy. With his stumpy legs and a grin that never budged, Wonder Boy shuffled through that flat landscape on quest after quest to rescue his eternally-endangered girlfriend. My mate and I learned to make 20c last a long time on that machine, guiding our hero through the various perils of the game with the aid of a fairy, some magic fruit and, of course, a skateboard.
So for me, when it came to choosing a game to celebrate as part of Bleeding Heart Gallery's Emulator, there was no competition.
But Emulator is an exhibition celebrating more than the 8-bit games themselves; it's also about the nostalgia we feel for them, our fondness for the pixilated pastimes we once had. So my Wonder Boy is, like many people who were kids in the 80s, a bloke who's not as young as he used to be but is still young at heart. With a new set of wheels, this is a thirty-something Wonder Boy who is glad to get back in the action.
The intensity and narrowness of the palate available to 1980s game designers was something I really enjoyed. In acknowledgement of that aesthetic, I have imposed cartoon-style figures in oil paint on a photo-naturalistic acrylic background, using the contrast of form, colour and materials to signify the juxtaposition this ageing Wonder Boy feels: the disused world of an 80s-style suburbia comes alive with superimposed icons from the game as, having thrown his axe at the right egg again after all these years, Wonder Boy rediscovers the brightness of his youth.
With many of the characters from the original Wonder Boy and nods to some of the great 8-bit games, this painting takes Wonder Boy to a new level.