Abdul Abdullah
Born 1986, Boorloo/Perth. Lives and works Warrane/Sydney and Bangkok, Thailand.
"I've got a beautiful feeling everything is going my way" 2018
oil on linen
Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2019.
Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore.
The title of this artwork is ‘I’ve got a beautiful feeling everything is going my way’ by Abdul Abdullah. It is an unframed stretched canvas painting created in 2018, measuring 1.2 metres square. It is made of oil on linen and the edges of the artwork are black. The artwork is unsigned on the front.
The background is grey and there are 2 overlapping images on top. The first is a realistic painting of a pixelated and fuzzy photo of a fiery explosion. The explosion is narrower along the bottom of the artwork and expands outwards into rounded plumes that almost fill the canvas. It is different shades of black, yellow, orange and purplish red and darker at the base and lighter along the top and extremities. The paint is applied thickly in short narrow brushstrokes.
In sweeping solid lines of white paint over the top and around the outside of the explosion is an outline of a round and bald cartoon head. It is tilted and turned up towards the top left corner, and the facial features are on the same diagonal. The lines are wide with some variation in width and have crisp defined edges. There are 2 small circular outlines for eyes and a protruding arch shape for a nose. The mouth is an outline of a downward turned oval, like a jelly-bean shape. The head has a large, curved line for the ear near the bottom right corner. Two short outward diagonal lines either side of the bottom of the head indicate the top of the neck and shoulders. The outline of the head fills the entire surface of the canvas with the top of the head, back of the ear and tip of the nose, slightly cut off by the edges of the artwork.
The surface of the painting is glossy and slightly textured. The image of the explosion is based on a stock image from airstrikes on a neighbourhood in Mosul, Iraq in 2017. The title of the artwork references a popular song by Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers.