In January 2005 Kay, Simon and I went on holiday to Lanzarote for a week. We hired a villa on the outskirts of Playa Blanca, the town on the southern tip of the island that didn't exist before tourism invented it.

Playa Blanca has a seafront promenade from which you can see the glittering Atlantic Ocean, the beaches of Papagayo and the coastline of Lanzarote's sister Canary Island Fuerteventura in the distance. The promenade is lined with the kind of restaurants that no local person would ever visit, places that have display menus in Spanish, English and German, whose employees try to hustle likely-looking passers-by inside to eat burgers, steak, spaghetti and scampi dinners.

One evening as the three of us strolled along the prom, Simon stopped suddenly, turned around, said: "You've got to see this!" and marched to a gift shop called Mystic that we'd just passed. Outside the shop was a bin full of paintings, all oil on canvas, you know, real paintings, painted by hand. Subject matter ranged from hippy spirituality to dolphins, Rastafarians, skyscapes, dope leaves, Aztec iconography, animals, sexy ladies and more. The bigger ones sold for €50.

Simon picked out this painting, which was considerably reduced on special offer, presumably because it was too weird for anyone else's tastes. At first, he said, "I couldn't work out whether it was good or terrible, ugly or funny." But there was clearly something beguiling about the painting and Kay and I persuaded him to buy it.

Click image to see bigger version

Untitled, it was unlike all the others in colour, style and subject. We had a look at it and agreed that unlike the others, which were obviously painted for money, this was probably the painting that expressed the artist's true vision.

Upon returning to our villa Simon laid the painting out so that we could look at it over the remainder of our holiday. The more we looked at it the less sense it made. What initially appeared to be a comment about 9/11 and the World Trade Centre became confused: were those red blobs alien spaceships? What was that expression on the earth's face? Was that a guitar? And is this a paintbrush? Is the painting painting itself?

I asked my friends and this is what they said:

purejuice
I don't think the red blobs are spaceships, because the thing between the guitar's right shoulder and the left WTC tower is obviously a spaceship. The red blobs I'll have to think about. I thought they were fish in a school when I first saw them, given the fishy constellation of white shapes to the north east of each school. But no. Is the face a globe, as in world map? With a beard of something? Global warming, the other apocalyptic event with WTC attack? Still pondering the fish/spaceships. I think I'm coming down on the side of fish.

crazycrone
Guitar? I was wondering why the Witness to the Apocalypse gave himself such a long neck. It makes sense about the 'beard' as melting icecaps. Personally, I had the red blobs down as a rain of doomsday fireballs. But if the head is the earth, wtf is it smiling about? You see comets and stuff with sort of fins in medieval art. At least I have. The thing's obviously dangerous; you have to keep going back to look at it some more. What I saw originally was a bearded John the Evangelist character trancing out ecstatically at his visions of The End, sitting at a table with his book, etc, and the guitar was his body.

k_mars
There was nothing to see on charlottecooper.net except some painting about the time when Nommo the FishGod rises finally from the abyss to usher in the end days and claim his awful prize - humanity: the cankered pearl cowering in the folds of the world-oyster. 2012 here we come.

Ed
Isn't that Osama Bin Laden, rather than the "earth's face"? I mean it has a beard and all, unless all the water is running off...

The person who supplied the most compelling explanation is Susan Stinson, who said:

Title: Aquarium Unframed
The man with the blue guitar is a blue guitar. He is Picasso, the sensualist, world-headed artist, and he is celebrating with little cakes (like pots of glue) with candles. He sees everything: fishes in the ocean which is also the sky, the past and the future, a faint reflection of the viewer in the open cover of the book of life (can you see yourself there?), the twin towers burning, and the fires under the planet's surface, which cracks open like a papier mache egg. He's seen that the earth is really Saturn, wearing a great big hairband, but that's not a problem, because there are many earths, many saturns, so if this one cracks, pops and burns, we can take a deep breath, float into the chilly water of the sky, and the guitar, book, brush, palette, and the smiling, cold, beachball earth will bloat with us, up and out of the frame. Did I mention that the picasso head earth is a saint, too? Thus the birthday cake votive candles.

Susan is the winner!