Lend me your prophet is an ongoing series of dinosaur paintings that have been developing since 2006. Taking the anachronism and parallel of painting as a given within the context of this motif, Lend me your prophet attempts to map out distinctions of the real from the imagined within a metaphorical trajectory. This developed out of an obsession I had with the dinosaur balloon in Strangeways here we come, that I painted in 2005 (see 'other paintings'). Fixated with locating appropriate source material for the representation of something that existed millions of years ago, I figured that I could only represent its passing. In this I created a series of paintings that re-contextualised dinosaur skeletons within a strategic narrative discourse.

At an embryonic level they come to represent the 'imaginary' friend in childhood and thus already wrestle reality from fiction. More significantly however in certain quarters, it is their relationship to (Darwinian) evolution and Intelligent Design theory that predominates. For me this cliché of their rhetorical value within different belief systems becomes interesting. In this context, several pieces that feature here are derived from documentary photos found on a website that archives the development and construction of a creationist museum in America. References are also made to paintings in art history that take on the 'Expulsion from Eden' narrative.

Simon Willems