The Ivy

A Crowd in Full Voice, a Man in Stillness

The Ivy, the final painting in Agony in the Garden: Series 1, presents an older nude white man standing alone among the chaos of a football crowd. Faces scream, arms lift, scarves wave — the collective emotion is unmistakable, almost euphoric. And in the centre of it all: a man, naked and unshouting, turned inward as the noise passes over him.

Where The Rose Bush explored the ceremony of elite leisure, The Ivy moves to the other end of the spectrum — to a working-class theatre of expression, loyalty, and release. Both paintings explore class, performance, and exposure. But they do so from different vantage points — two sides of the same coin, spun once and caught mid-air.

Not the Same, But Not Opposite

What strikes me is not just the contrast between the two figures — one Black, one white; one young, one old — but the unexpected echoes between them. Each is unclothed, still, and oddly calm amid frenzy. Each draws attention by doing nothing at all.

But the emotional response they evoke shifts. The football crowd feels visceral, familiar. The man feels vulnerable in a different way. There is no reverence here — no haloed iconography. And yet, in this exposure, something sacred still surfaces. Not in status, but in surrender.

This is not the patriarch or the pariah. He is simply there, looking inward while the crowd looks out.

Painting the Pressure

The painting uses the same oil-and-beeswax approach as the rest of the series. I worked the surface densely, especially in the crowd — overlapping marks, raised textures, flicks of scarf and face-paint layered with palette knives. In contrast, the central figure was rendered with restraint. Smoother. Paler. More internal.

While The Rose Bush leans into decadence and self-staging, The Ivy feels raw, almost bleached by the noise around it. The colour palette is cooler here — greens, greys, and flashes of team colour — a nod to ivy as something that both clings and climbs.

There’s no clear symbolism in the plant itself, but the name holds the idea of entanglement. Of being wrapped in something bigger than yourself.

A Shared Solitude

Viewed alone, The Ivy is a portrait of masculine exposure amid tribal belonging — a man disconnected from the very world he appears to be part of. But when seen alongside The Rose Bush, a deeper duality emerges. Both men are outsiders in their own settings. Both are caught in performances they didn’t sign up for. And both hold a mirror to what we do with our collective selves — how we lose ourselves, protect ourselves, or attempt to belong.

You can read either painting as a critique or a celebration. That’s the point.

What matters is the tension: between crowd and individual, status and self, participation and pause.