The End
1994
Mixed media on canvas
28" x 10"
71.1cm x 25.4cm
Contribution
A one-off experiment in extreme panoramic format within OG Oil Paintings, driven by available materials rather than compositional planning. Notable for combining a Turner-derived sky treatment with an overtly literary, Camus/Kafka-inflected narrative — a figure walking toward a guillotine through a sublime landscape. The artist's own retrospective view is that the ambition of the concept exceeded its formal execution; the format, color balance, and fisheye handling were not carried forward into later work.
About the work
A narrow panoramic oil painting of a figure walking along a lagoon-side walkway toward a guillotine, under a Turner-inspired sunset sky. A narrow panoramic oil painting (28" x 10") depicting a raised wooden walkway running the length of the canvas, from a roughly-painted guillotine and fort-like structure on the left, past a moored riverboat, along a blue lagoon lined with palm trees, toward a lone figure walking away from the viewer — moving toward the guillotine, not away from it. Above, a Turner-inspired sunset sky in orange, pink, and blue streaks. Made in a San Francisco backyard in 1994, informed by a period of reading Camus and Kafka; the palette pairs a warm sky against the cool blue of the lagoon.
Intent
Not fully articulated as intent at the time; on reflection, the painting was reaching for something about mortality and the absurd — a figure walking toward a guillotine through a sublime sunset landscape, the beauty of the world continuing regardless of what is coming.
Direct inspiration
Reading Camus and Kafka around this period — the condemned figure moving through indifferent or absurd circumstance. Not a direct illustration of either writer, but the reading was in the air at the time of painting.
Making
Made outside in a San Francisco backyard in 1994. The panoramic 28" x 10" format was not planned around the composition — Bernard believes he simply had those stretcher bars and enough canvas on hand and wanted to try the shape.
Context of making
Blind description named a road leading to a guillotine next to a town. On seeing the image, the guillotine and the roughly-painted fort/building structure were confirmed on the far left, next to a moored riverboat — initially misread by the agent as part of the boat rigging. The 'road' resolved as a raised wooden walkway running the length of the panorama, past a blue lagoon lined with palm trees. The core image — a walk toward an execution — held even though the surrounding detail differed from memory.
Where it went
Bernard's retrospective assessment: the painting 'missed on some level.' The panoramic size was never attempted again. The warm/cool color balance (sunset sky against the blue lagoon) didn't fully work. The fisheye distortion effect, in wide use in this period, was overdone here. Conceptually, reaching for mortality and the absurd at this scale felt, in retrospect, 'kinda pompous.'
In the practice
Made during a period when a recurring fisheye-lens distortion effect was running through the work ('the fish eye thing that was going on'). The panoramic format itself was a one-off, never repeated in the series.
What this isn't
The 28" x 10" panoramic format was never used again after this painting.
In the series
OG Oil Paintings, 1994. Sits within the fisheye-distortion period of the series; the guillotine and figure-walking-toward-death imagery has no known repeat elsewhere in the series.
The sky is Turner-inspired, a treatment Bernard was painting a lot of at the time — connecting this work to the same Turner throughline already identified in After Turner. The overall scenario (a figure walking calmly toward death within a sublime landscape) echoes the ending of Camus's The Stranger, where the world's indifferent beauty persists regardless of the character's fate. Recorded as an atmospheric/literary touchpoint rather than a direct visual influence.
Visual Similarity
Works with similar visual structure, found by comparing image embeddings across the archive.
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The composition is an extreme horizontal panorama, organized in three flat bands: a wide sky occupying roughly the upper half, a dark mountainous silhouette running the width of the frame as a middle register, and a foreground of raked, warm-toned ground and a raised walkway cutting diagonally across the lower third toward a body of still blue water. A row of tall, thin-trunked palm trees is spaced with near-mechanical regularity along the walkway, their verticals puncturing the horizon band and giving the composition a repeating rhythm against the otherwise horizontal pull of the landscape. A single small figure, rendered in dark, minimal strokes, is positioned on the walkway right of center, walking away from the viewer along its length. On the far left edge of the canvas, a cluster of vertical and rectilinear forms — reading as a tall post-and-lintel structure beside lower boxy architecture and what appears to be a moored vessel — breaks from the surrounding organic and atmospheric forms with harder, more angular geometry, creating a visual anchor distinct from everything else in the frame. The palette splits cleanly into two temperature zones. The upper two-thirds is dominated by a sunset gradient of deep blue shading through orange, salmon, and pale yellow, streaked with elongated pink-and-white cloud forms that sweep horizontally like brushed pigment. Against this, the lower third introduces a cool counter-note: a saturated ultramarine-to-white body of water, edged by warm ochre and ash-brown ground. The dark hill silhouette functions as a tonal hinge between the two zones, nearly black and flattened, with no internal modeling. Handling throughout favors loose, wet-into-wet blending in the sky and water, against comparatively flatter, more graphic treatment of the palm trunks, walkway, and the left-edge architectural cluster. Mood is difficult to pin to a single register — the palette and cloud handling read as lush and almost celebratory, while the flattened dark hills, the isolated walking figure, and the stark left-edge structure introduce a starker, more subdued undertone. The combination produces an atmosphere closer to ceremonial or processional than purely scenic. On coexisting time or state cues: the scene reads as a single continuous moment rather than overlapping temporalities, but there is a spatial ambiguity worth naming precisely — the walkway's perspective lines and the water's edge do not fully reconcile into one consistent vanishing-point system, giving the sense of a composite or imagined space rather than a single observed view. What resists confident description is the cluster of forms at the far left edge of the canvas: the vertical post-and-lintel shape beside the boxy structures and moored vessel is painted with enough gestural looseness that its function is genuinely ambiguous from the image alone — it could read as dock infrastructure, as architecture, or as something more specifically constructed, and the image does not resolve which.
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