“The Honky Tonk” 5ft x 5ft acrylic on canvas How do you paint a dream? A Honky Tonk bar is a space that isn’t known to be queer (with the rare Round-Up-Saloon exception). As part of the series of paintings introducing my work to a new audience across the pond, I wanted to continue my conversation with the cowboy iconography — a paper totem of American masculine identity — and take over the space that this identity inhabits. Here, a couple sits and contemplates a dance. Maybe one is leaning in to ask the other. And then we see their future laid out as the composition goes further back into a loose, vague space. We see them dance, and then perhaps again — much older — kissing in the corner. Or maybe that’s not them, maybe that’s another couple, cowboys who have paved a path for them — but cowboys painted with a transparency, the idea of a future, or the memory of a past that doesn’t exist. Embedded in the queer identity is a disappearing, an erasure. The cowboy hat, the jeans, the striped shirt and boots — a uniform that signals an aggression towards the feminine, the effeminate, the deviant — is donned by the very individuals it aims to shield itself from. This place exists in a dream, or an alternate reality where these identities and spaces coexist. But the focus isn’t on alienation, it’s on tenderness. It’s a story not about loneliness but, on the contrary, about a longing. If we follow the eye-line of the figure on the right, we see his same hand — which lies on the table awaiting, perhaps hesitating — is then gripping his lover’s back with a pull that says, “I give in. I don’t care. I just want to be close to you.” Perhaps the bravery of existing in a space is less of a fight of will and more a concession of the heart. One can only dream. “The Invitation” solo show opens at @taymourgrahneprojects on September 27th