Luke King-Salter
Albano's View from the Thunderhouse
Acrylic on board, 59.4 x 84 cm. 2021. SOLD
An abstract illustration of Jean Paul Richter's novel Titan. The novel's hero, Albano, contemplates the world from his mountain dwelling—known as the Thunderhouse because, high above the surrounding landscape, it is so frequently struck by lightning.
Albano is an idealistic youth who loves life, nature, beauty, truth and humanity, but who is destined to suffer the machinations of friends and enemies alike.
The painting is a highly abstract landscape, unsettled and fragmentary. There is a blending of heaven and earth that indicates the blending of ideal and real in Albano's ecstatic vision of the world, and a looseness that indicates both the intensity of that vision and the turbulent times that await him.