Private collection of Sofia Galvão.

“I was listening a lot to the Smiths at this time I think this painting could have been influenced by the cover to "The Queen is dead" by the Smiths which features Alain Delon lying on the ground from the film 'L'Insoumis' (1964). My friend Ged (Adamson) posed for this painting in a similar fashion with one hand on his chest and I put some gladioli next to him as Morrissey used to have gladioli sticking out his back pocket when he performed. I was listening to The Smiths and the Stone Roses first album during this period."

The painting also features John Lennon’s ‘Spaniard in the Works’ on the ground to the right which features the photo by Robert Freeman.

The electric fire that is in the painting is based on the one in his Whitechapel studio. The painting is reminiscent of the Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis in its theme.

"It felt like the death of painting at the time and the personal death of my education. I know I felt out on a limb in both my situation and my interests. So maybe the pretend 'death' depicted in the painting was a metaphor for this. In this painted scenario I placed the figure in an attic bedsit reminiscent of the Kitchen Sink dramas of the Sixties. ‘Room at the Top’ ‘Look back in Anger’ etc

In the early nineties Furr finally got an Acme studio at 41 New Road Whitechapel London. A listed building in the old Jewish quarter. He lived there for a while without heat and hot water.

In 1991 Furr received a much needed grant from the Canadian Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for figurative artists. The grant enabled Furr to create a spate of larger figurative paintings.

The paintings of this period deal with two themes. Kitchen sink realism and reimagined romanticism - where contemporary figures appear in either gritty interiors or imagined natural landscapes using older paintings as sources. He began with “Dead student 1990” which combines kitchen sink realism with his interest in the romantic tradition of 18th c portraiture and painting.

The composition of an apparently dead figure lying in what looks like a bedsit is borrowed from Velazquez’s ‘Dead Toreador’ in the National Gallery and later Manet’s “Dead Toreador” based on the former.

A cloudy grey skied Coronation Street type view appears in the window harking back to the artists Northern background and the ‘macabre appeal of the North’ where ‘it is grim up north’. In the lower left corner is a crudely painted ‘Acid House’ smiley face. It was the time of rave culture.

"I think now it might have been about that feeling one gets sometimes in life when leaving a tenure or period of doing something and then being in the new state having the slightly exciting but also unsettling feeling of not knowing what’s coming next in your life. In this case the main character is apparently dead or playing dead or ‘out of it’ or in a state of some kind. Maybe obliteration with all the associations this brings to mind. What was also going on culturally was rave culture so to counteract the slighltly downbeat theme I painted a cartoon-like Acid House smiley in the lower left corner. I think I liked the addition of incongruous almost random things and cartoony elements which probably comes from my early love of the Beano”

This addition of cartoon like linear elements also breaks the idea of 3d illusion and act like a Brechtian chorus to make the viewer conscious of the surface of a painting. It is something that reoccurs in Furr’s works from the overtly cartoon ‘Big Pink Fish in Fishy World 1988’ up to the ‘Serpentine painting 2022’ where some of the flowers in the lower foreground appear as radical 2d linear cartoon like depictions.