Good Friday is the name of a sequence of four figurative coloured pencil drawings that explore themes of severance, fatherhood, isolation, grief and memory. It is time torn up into chunks, a chain of immobile minutes, a kiss goodbye, a see you soon, I hope. Vibrant, assiduous, and somewhat ambivalent, Good Friday marks both an ending for a family,  and genesis of a life unaccompanied,

These drawings are about the instinct one may possess for structure & routine in the face of seismic personal and emotional change. For example in the third drawing Error  we see a figure the author seated at a dining table eating the last mouthful of his evening meal. Despite the grave and critical tone of the preceding picture, routine is  for this man now at least preserved; all that should be happening is, and yet it isn't: the calendar is barren, the days, the weeks, the year omitted, wiped clean, no past and no future. Time is away and someplace else. The phone screen displaying 404 - an error code for when a webpage no longer exists or can no longer be reached  - is a scornful summary of the circumstances. Comfort, validation, commitment, love all seem very far away. By now his family have become an abstract, almost entirely absent from the home, their presence is metaphysical, evidenced purely by the glass of roses, and leftover crusts on a lime green plate. The bags beneath his eyes droop down into his cheeks whilst the video on his phone malfunctions. Or perhaps he was reading? it is unverifiable. What we can see in this picture is the that the rule no screens at the dinner table has been overruled. A house rule decidedly broken. Where do we go from here? perhaps the recurrent cat has the answer? At times its presence is ambassadorial, functioning as some strange mediator between us, and him. The cats eyes question, they probe, dare and challenge and confront. In the eponymous drawing the cats expression is so violent, so paranoic that it perfuses the protagonist. The felines fanatical expression seems so potent as to feed into his undetermined anguish. It is almost as though the cat feels for him, or that it conveys a farther, distant aspect of his emotional state. 

Despite these unsmiling themes, Good Friday is a vibrant sequence of drawings that represents a new direction in the development of Stokes' practice. His understanding of narrative and newfound treatment of colour demonstrates a maturity and refinement hitherto absent from his work; vivid pinks and rich greens vitalise these carefully composed interiors. In I. Prologue the composition is arranged according to the principles of the Fibonacci spiral, beginning with the roses in the middle and following onto the face of the mother whose gaze leads us down towards the eldest of two children. The composition unfolds as we discover the inscrutable expression of a cat, which in turn leads us to the smallest child, looking wondrously up at her father who, rather than returning her gaze, glances instead at a whiteboard comprehensively detailing the means of the days moving forward. In the subsequent image we learn the significance of the meaning of the words on this whiteboard.

Good Friday is a succinct and sensitive insight to the way in which one father accepts and adapts to life without his children. These drawings floodlight the unguarded memories of the unconscious with an appalling clarity, bringing to bear the anguish and dread that chases grief.

Top Row:

I. Prologue

II. Good Friday

Bottom Row:

II. Error

IV. G'night

All works were completed in 2025 and are pencil on paper, measuring approx 28cm x 36cm unframed.

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