This is the view from the top of our barley paddock, across the hills, during an approaching storm.

At risk of sounding pretentious, a piece of sculpture that has stuck in my mind for nearly 40 years is a work by Giacometti, in the Tate Gallery in London, of a  group of isolated figures. This recollection, combined with the flat plane of the paddock, produced the two men, whom I had photographed in Adelaide some time ago. Then Marilyn Manson got added.

The fence is, of course, symbolic of all sorts of things, but the reason I used it was that I had wanted to do that particular fence for a while and whenever I visualised the work, there it was, right smack in front. The original fence is alongside a disused railway line where someone had banged these old droppers arbitrarily into the hard ground, then strung barbed wire along them. I had intended to also use the slackness of the wire, but when I finally got to it, right at the end of the painting, slack, droopy things just didn't fit.

**There are more notes on the fence on the Compare Fences Page and there is a comparison of my development in painting the Mount Lofty Ranges on the Compare Hills Page.