Stripped Bear

The Hero’s Journey, 2010, Oil, Acrylic & Screen Print on Canvas, 184cm x 123cm, Painting

The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey emerged during a period of depression, loneliness and profound disconnection. During Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, LUAP returned to a family photograph kept for years in his mother’s bedroom drawer. Taken at a theme park in the 1980s, it shows him as a child with his Mum, Dad and brother beside a giant neon-pink bear. Its vivid colour and excess belong unmistakably to the decade, while for LUAP the image held something more private, a memory of innocence, love and safety.

At the same time, Lone Soldiers used solitary, damaged and entangled trees as psychological stand-ins for feelings LUAP struggled to express directly. He was internalising much of what he felt, increasingly disconnected from those around him and from his own sense of self. The childhood bear entered these same forests.

In translating the memory into The Pink Bear, LUAP rejected the fixed smile of the original toy. He wanted a face that could remain emotionally unresolved, allowing feeling to emerge through posture, gesture and its relationship to the landscape. LUAP donned the costume himself for the first photographs. The Bear became both alter ego and mask, a way of occupying the image while partially disappearing inside it.

The figure moves through the forest alone, lost and searching for friendship, love, purpose and belonging. The title draws on the cyclical structure of the hero’s journey, leaving the familiar world, passing through ordeal and transformation, and returning changed. Within the work is the hope that becoming lost might be necessary before something can be found again, and that the journey through darkness might offer the possibility of return, even rebirth.