Years End 2016

Here comes the fire
Our funeral pyre, baby”

Neil Hannon with the Divine Comedy-Here Comes the Flood

So 2016-the year of the reaper, the year the world lost its collective Reality TV-addled mind and went full tilt Walking Dead.
If the year began with the untimely passing of my greatest idol, it ends with a morticians pool that feels akin to some kind of celebrity rapture. Lest we forget the real horrors of Aleppo and Orlando. death toll the bell.

November brought another death, the year America got a malignant tumor and instead of performing a routine biopsy, decided to vote en masse to let the carcinoma riddle its way like a scourge through every vital organ. Prognosis isn’t good, and it currently lies choking its last, toxic gargled breath on a hallucinatory diet of hate and bitter rancor, stale 1950’s apple pie peppered with Cheeto dust and bullshit.  Experts are worried that unless the infection is contained, it may reach epidemic proportions with mass casualty.

Indeed.

Glibs aside, this sad sack year was party to the loss of two friends and an uncle to cancer. Fuck cancer.

It’s certainly no accident then that the compilation of works from the year, heavily feature some sort of death’s head motif.

On the other hand, my Art career has never looked more buoyant, so there’s that. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.

The supporters, the curators, the gallery’s, my wife, my family and friends.

No small blessings.

And in the post-Brexit, Trumpocalypse, what prospect for the year’s turn one wonders? The totalitarian pall of 1930’s Weimar Germany, the shadow of a reemerging cold war, a civil war, a race war, economic meltdown, genocide, the annihilation of the entire world at the infantile trigger-tweet finger of a despotic lunatic?  Take your pick.

I’ll be in my studio daubing as the world burns.

No better time than the end times after all.