Locked in a great embrace, the man and woman of The Kiss, Haymarket capture a rare moment between two people in love. The world around the couple becomes skewed and time and space seems to dissolve, the only thing each person can see and feel is one another. Like other works from this first Haymarket series, emotional intensity takes precedence over location. The Kiss is a universal image of love, with the only semblance of place indicated through the bright orange bouquet of flowers that the man probably bought from a florist in the market. As Barry Pearce explains, “…his early Haymarket paintings confirmed him as the new poet of the city, someone who could take a neglected seedy corner of Sydney and its inhabitants and wring out of it with tough honesty an image that was at once personal and universal…Most of the first Haymarket paintings, with their thick fluid paint, are typified by images of inner city inhabitants hemmed in by the limitations of their world, physical and mental. In some ways they may be seen to be emblematic of the artist’s own obsession with the idea of freedom…”

Reference: Pearce, Barry Kevin Connor, Craftsman House, Roseville East NSW, 1989.pp.25