"A couple of days ago I posted my first-ever oil painting, a self-portrait from December 1983, and here is the second oil I did a few months later, early in 1984 still aged 16. I had been fascinated by trompe l'œil paintings - which are supposed to 'trick the eye' into believing you were seeing a real object rather than its image. For a class project I decided to produce this jokey version of that sort of painting, and the pinned up 'paper' was based on a Jacobean play title page with an illustration of a hanged man and another, holding a burning torch. The text reads: "The Aged Viol by Paul Binnie. Newly Acted. Alas it is my son Paul, whiche they have hung for painting a trompe l’œil cliché", and the figure gestures to a tiny representation of this very painting. As ever, there are layers of humor in there; I very well knew that this subject was a cliché before I painted it in this style, but I did it anyway… " Paul Binnie, Dec 19, 2023
