Art Decade 2009-2019

“I wish I could spend my days, lost in the pursuit of paint, all in the name of a greater journey-THAT greater journey.”
Me-November 18th 2009

(Top) “Legend” (2009)-oil on canvas | 30″ x 40″

A decade closing then. Time to take personal stock. Tally the gains against the losses. Measure the clock, along with the lines on your face, and the marks on the canvas.

I’ve been doing my own introspection of the whole retrospection lately, diving through decades old blog posts, and for all the highs, lows, occasional navel gazing, pretentious waffle and daubed missteps, the one constant ally has been the work. The eradicable drive to continue on the painted quest against sometimes insurmountable odds. At times it’s felt hopeless, like total folly, at others a sanctuary of illumination, but always a restless, fathomless pursuit for meaning in this mad, bad thing called life.

I imagine all this means that for myself, the muse and the rest of you still willing to enjoy what I do, we are stuck with one another until we all fall down, or are blown to smithereens.
Nevertheless, my gratitude is as boundless as the event horizon, for those who’ve stuck with and supported me this far.

Here then, is a piece from each year-souvenirs that mark my greater journey.

Theothanatos | Ghosts | Man/son | Purgatorium | La Bodega | Paradiso’s Fall

Legacy-an Artists General Truth-(2011)–Oil on Canvas | 48″x24″

“Osmosis” (2011)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 24″

“Rise” (2012)-oil on canvas | 30″ x 40″

“What’s Past is Prologue” (2013)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“This Thing of Darkness, I Acknowledge Mine” (2014)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“The Devil” (2015)-oil on canvas |36″ x 48″

“Leviathan” (2016)-oil on canvas | 42″ x 80″

“Wrath” (2017)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“The Voyage of Elen” (2018)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“Origins of a Black Hole” (2019)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

View from Abridge

“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let them know how dreadful war is, and to stimulate peoples powers of resistance”
Otto Dix.

“What’s the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

So details for my part, 2019, the stillborn Paradiso’s fall an abridged version.
Resembles a Lynchian comic strip, or the trimester of  something unspeakable.
A fairly accurate summary of the year then, peering as we are, back into the black abyss of a decade, that began with such promise, but as Chuck Palahnuik once mooted, switched to being a threat.
For myself, that means the future holds no better prospect than the paint that will continue to flow in tandem with the inevitable deluge of blood and tears the coming era will define.

See you all on the other side of the easel then.

Retrofit

“…he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won.”

Philip K Dick-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Here we are then at the cusp of years end, my latest work for some future event, peering over my shoulder.

Caught a rerun of Bladerunner at a little art house cinema recently, which I guess was showing, because the future November 2019 it takes place in, had finally caught up with us.

Watching it now, 37 years on, feels more like opening a time capsule of early 80s milieu.

One retrofitted like it’s Bradbury building, with a heady array of that eras cultural zeitgeist.

Hypnagogic film noir, decaying Rococo decadence, grainy Philip Marlow silhouettes and Erte flourishes, against a sprawling cityscape that looks like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis meets Limehouse, populated by the peacock exotica of the Blitz nightclub. All whilst a small guerrilla band of lethal new wave androids, fronted by the Bowie like Übermensch-Roy Batty, follow a promethium quest to meet their maker.

At the end when Batty recited the beautiful tears in rain monologue that I’ve heard so many times , I could repeat it from memory, I couldn’t help but feel the sting of my own tears. 

Not because I remembered that Rutger Haur had died this year-as sad and untimely unjust as that seems, given the crass grotesque that still sucks air and light from everything.

Nor was it because I felt as stirred again by the message and it’s messenger, despite the words feeling ever more prevalent as they do with aging. 

But that it represented moments lost in time from my nascent years that have long gone, ones that envisaged an monolithic vision of sophisticated cultural and technological culmination, imbued by a literary assemblage of references from Dante to Burroughs, Shelley to the Sex Pistols. A metaphorical aesthetic that was a hallucinatory collage of a future as past, from a period in time when it didn’t seem any future was promised us.

It still isn’t.

Of all the things that 2019 failed to live up to-and I’m thinking of my beloved England’s recent sepukku -I can’t help but feel that one of it’s greatest disappointments, was in no longer realizing the aspirations we held back then.

Nowhere Towns

“It was as though they consciously cast themselves as outsiders. An undermining confederacy within this outwardly god-fearing and respectable house. A commitment to the sadness of being white trash”

-Gordon Burn, Happy Like Murderers

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.”
“I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.”
“You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”

― John Fowles, The Magus

It’s a detail from the new piece, a pyre of strewn garbage for the emperor of trash I’m painting, and it could be anywhere, from a no place in a nowhere town.

And yet I suppose I’ve been thinking more specifically of the Liverpool of my childhood as I paint it. “Ollers’ we’d call them back then, little stretches of land where grand old tenements had once stood, now earmarked as a dumping ground for all manner of human detritus. A mountain of piss stained mattresses, and rotting putrid meat in Styrofoam cartons. A graveyard for a human staining footprint, but nonetheless our playgrounds as kids.

This was long before trash became a trope of contemporary art, like the time when I went to the MOMA in LA, and saw a binbag mounted on a wall.  There’s a telling chasm right there-the distinction between the perception of the wealthy elites and the indentured poor, like finding the slops of ones childhood broth, re marketed as a menu special in a Michelin star restaurant.

Here of course, in my artistic playground, everything from a discarded Embassy #6 ciggy packet, to a Robinsons Jam box, to a rotten apple has a resonance beyond merely being a glib ornament.

I’ve been reading Happy Like Murders, a book about 25 Cromwell Street, and the horror home of Fred and Rose West, turning each page with stomach churning dread. The picture it paints is of a degenerative world on the edge of Dean Forest in Gloucester ( Dennis Potters former literary stomping ground). It’s an almost Hogarthian world on the fag end of the 60’s and early 70’s, a hopeless parade of toothless yobs, bully boys, headcases, duggies, kiddie fiddlers, hoodlums, slags, chancers and tealeeves. Working class zeroes-all seemingly salt of the Earth types,pub licked by a life of grime from the bowels of the craggy pitts, or having done a stretch at her majesty’s pleasure.

It’s a sad sack world I’m very much familiar with, one where from the cradle to the grave-tomorrow never comes, because it never belonged to you to begin with. 

So I’m familiar when I see it here in the US also, dust clad nowhere towns, with the chewed up forgotten sputum of human chattel, clinging to the ‘olde world’ for succor, stewing in yesteryear’s garbage, embracing what Flaubert once referred to as the ‘true immorality’-wilful ignorance and stupidity.

Because a society starved of morality, becomes a hell breeding monsters, like the slick oil of an eel, sliding through the hollow of an asses skull.

Fallout

“How can I save my little boy
From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence” 

Russians- Sting

It’s that time of year again, the feast of samhain, the witching hour resurrection of spirits and classic horror video nasties on DVD.

I’m reminded of the time back in the early 80’s, when a psychological horror of a different kind consumed the metaphysical airwaves.

Back then, between ads for chocolate digestives and Danger Mouse, you could look forward to public information broadcasts informing you what to do in the event of a nuclear blast.

By the same guy who did voice overs for Barrett homes no less.




While the transmission of Threads in ’84, dismissed any hope that sanctuary could be sought in a cupboard under the stairs, it did instill the kind of paralyzing terror that would come to dwarf all the cheap thrills of late night Halloween horror.



I have youthful levity to thank for lessening the full gravity of days when bombing drills, meant my classmates and I  would have to hide under our desks.

But there was no escape, because it permeated culturally, everything steadfastly preparing us for annihilation, because even the our record collections echoed sirens songs for the end times. Everyone from Prince’s infectious carrion call to Party like its 1999 as a defiant final act of hedonism, through Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes which adopted the air raid siren from public information broadcast as it’s opening salvo.*

By the time warnings about the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl’s liquefying core, had settled over European pastures, nothing could mollify the terrible forebodings of the ultimate zero sum game.

There’s some of that sense of dread in this latest work I feel, reanimated in an era assailed by the toxic unraveling of a deranged mind,trigger finger poised over the final reset button, and venerated by a host of pious followers, rapture ravenous for the vindication that might be wrought from total annihilation.

As I said in a post back in 2017-we are living “the consequence of longing for a period when things were purportedly ‘great’.

Because along with the desire to relive all the illusory days of maga-nificence ,with it’s bargain basement but equally dementia addled Reagan, come all that era’s terrible distemper’s. The past is littered with as much gore as it is glory, and like the my favorite horror story-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein-reanimating the dead, can only ever bring with it the bitter stench of the grave.

*In writing this post, I was both nostalgic and a little alarmed recalling the chart fare I listened to of the period. The list could be compiled to make an End of the world party collection.

Prince-Party Like it’s 1999
OMD-Enola Gay
Alphaville-Forever Young
Ultravox-Dancing with tears in my eyes
Nena-99 Luftballons
Heaven 17-Lets all Make a Bomb
Billy Bragg-Between the Wars
Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes
Kate Bush-Breathing Sisters of Mercy-Dominion/Mother Russia
Morrissey-Everyday is like Sunday
Scorpions-Winds of Change
The Clash-London Calling
David Bowie-When the Wind Blows
Sting-Russians
Peter Gabriel-Games without Frontiers
Duran Duran-Planet Earth
Mike and the Mechanics-Silent Running
The Fixx-Stand or Fall
Men at Work-Overkill

For your listening/watching pleasure, I’ve compiled the full list on YouTube:

Stillborne

“Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.”

Medusa-Sylvia Plath

24′ x 36″
Oil on canvas

I’ve painted Medusa before, or at least her ghost, which was if memory serves, prompted by reading some Jack London.

This one-partially inspired by Plath’s gorgeous poem about her mother-also supposes what might have happened had the Gorgon queen avoided being dispatched by Perseus’s sword, and gone on to conceive Poseidon’s progeny.

Yes I know, she has a head of eels instead of snakes, but it felt rather more in keeping with Athena’s wrathful spite mocking the mariner God, as well as a nice chance to continue a symbolic trope I started with Origins of a Black Hole.

I’ll be showing the piece at Copro gallery, for Chet Zar’s first Dark Art Society Group Show this Saturday through October.

Mood swings.

“All art is exorcism”

Otto Dix

Maybe it’s the algorithmic nature of using the word-“mood”-but the last time I posted one of these, my inbox was cluster bombed with spam from Russia, hawking potency inducing pharmaceuticals.

I don’t know that much of the art pinned to my little cork board hails from the Slav republic, but it does raise my spirits as well as my aspirations daily, and is a sort of aural exemplar for me to draw on, going into the new series.

From Left to right then:

“Newborn baby on hands”-Otto Dix
Liverpool tenements 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“The Suicide of Judas”-John Canavesio
“Parable of the blind”-Pieter Bruegel
“Two Witches”-Hans Balding
“The Lamp of the Devil”-Francisco Goya
“House of Succubus”-Nona Limmen
“Uneven Couple”-Otto Dix
Liverpool playground 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“The Nightmare”-Pasquale Liotta Cristaldi
“Man of Sorrows Christ”-Hans Memling
“Sacrifice of Isaac”-Carravagio
“Abandoned Playground”-Erhan Yilmaz
“Seven Deadly Sins”-Otto Dix
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Fight with Cudgels”-Francisco Goya
“Three Women”-Otto Dix
“Trench Warfare”-Otto Dix
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Iron rods in a field”-sketch 1989- David Van Gough
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Woman pissing”-Picasso

Snake eyes

I’m working on a little diversion here- a side vent from the lava’s bubbling under current of Infernal.



Of course it’s for a show….yes, yes-I know I was no longer going to participate in group shows for the foreseeable future-but when the Dumbledore of Dark Art-Chet Zar invites you to the first ever Dark Art Society show at Copro, you don’t hesitate.

What’s with the Gorgon then? Ah well…all will be revealed soon, but I tell you my mind has felt like a nest of snakes (or in this case, eels) lately. Restless, tangled, fermenting.
It’s been like painting my physiognomy manifest.

The show will be opening just in time for the feast of Samhain month, and I’ll post full details along with the completed painting soon.

Paintheism

“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah”
The End-The Doors

“if art can’t tell us, about the world we live in, then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it.”
Robert Hughes-The Mona Lisa Curse

When I refer to my next series as “the Denouement”, I don’t just merely mean as an end to a trinity that began over five years ago. I mean it integrally. Entering this series, has felt like a final act, as if I am just some artistic documentarian on the end times.

And it’s been no stretch, I can tell you-I mean, everything feels like it is entering some sort of HBO grand finale now-even more underwhelming than Game of Thrones, because as apocalypses go, it all seems like business as usual.

An end of social norms, of known truths. Of civility. Of morality. Of intellectualism. Of culture. Of America. Of a future.  Meanwhile, the worlds lungs are an inferno, Ice shelves the size of cities cleave into the ocean, wakes are held for glaciers, and Russian reactors erupt, spewing isotopes into the ether, while the bloviator in chief, postulates the possibility of nuking hurricanes.  All this as the surface is scratched on a remote islands insidious underbelly, where an almost Schnitzler like cabalistic rite of passage, caters to the most vile of tastes and predilections for the rich and the affluent, as another head count for the NRA’s coffers and coffins, beleaguers the morning dreadlines.

It’s all too much to comprehend, particularly at 3am in the small clutch of fevered hours,when it can seem like the doors and windows are off their hinges and the tempests of chaos seem to rage through every vestibule of your mind.

How does an artist navigate these times then, is what we are doing enough or is it ultimately futile? Is the vantage point of being an observer, as desultory as being a passive abstainer? Are we to be like tinkers, commodifying the detritus of a socio political landfill, or alchemists forging the degrado into Instagram gold? Is art’s objective, to be just anthropological, a remnant from our own teetering Roman empire, for some future generation to point fingers and disseminate as some cautionary tale?

And round and around we go.

I read an article by Chris Hedges, The Artist as Prophet-in which he says “The artist makes the invisible visible. He or she shatters the clichés and narratives used to mask reality.” That’s some lofty burden of ambition right there, and he cites quotes from novelists like Russell Banks, and the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, but perhaps more of what he has in mind carries with it the weight of art like Goya’s third of May, or Picasso’s Guernica.
Except, how can art change the paradigm if it is purely post script? Is art only simulacrum and how can it affect us and impart change?

I read with interest some years ago that the color pink, was being used in certain Swiss prisons following a study by psychologist Daniela Späth, as a sort of sedative.  “A certain shade of pink calms the nerves” she had posited, and in fact the statistical results bore out that the inmates were less aggressive, once their cells were tinted flaming flamingo.

For myself, I think I’d last five minutes before screaming blue murder, but my point is that if art, with it’s collision of color and of hue, form and concept is similarly a subjectively unconscious, sublime experience,  then any of its revelations must be transcendentally existential -like codified transcripts that effect us on a psychological level beyond our surface understanding.  A kind of passive aggression-or transgression if you will.

And so I believe that these times that we live in-as imprisoned and terrorized as we feel, and so focused as the wardens seem on imminent destruction-cry out for the retaliation of creation and the creative impulse, more than ever.

For artists, it can be our greatest act of defiance and our most integral role.

Conspiracy Weary

“Healter Skelter”-24″ x 36″ – Oil on canvas (2012)

“I saw Elvis in a potato chip once.”

Fox Mulder, the X-Files

Today marks fifty years since the strata was jolted by news of the Manson killings, and other than the brouhaha around Tarantino’s latest desultory offing, it’s barely warranted a footnote in the press.

Unsurprising really, and frankly warranted, given the eclipsing daily horror show in this country right now. Although, given that both eras represent discriminate murders, initiated by cult members and galvanized by the rantings of a deranged egomaniac, it could be argued that recent headlines could give those of half a century ago a run for their money.

Still, I note the anniversary because of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna showcase, that consumed me through much of 2012.  Back then, bolstered by a literary diet that comprised things like the hefty volumes of Peter Levedna’s Sinister Forces,  Adam Gorightly’s The Shadow over Santa Susana, and every dank rabbit hole on the dark web-I crafted myself a tinfoil hat so tight, I almost microwaved grey matter.

That’s not to undermine the revelations I made during that particular artistic odyssey-I stand by what I said at the time, ” the connections around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies understanding”.
It does however give me a micro speck of insight, into the malaise of modern conspiracy theorists; basement dwellers, pulling on threads so to weave a magical carpet, and comfortably seat their confirmation biases on.

For what began with conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination, Roswell, the moon landing, Manson -has mutated and become the provenience of alt right agitators from 4chan cesspits, promulgating batshit schemes about Pizza parlors and the Earth being flat.
Or mass shootings as false flag events where the victims are crisis actors.

When ultimately, it’s all just another spiritual quest for understanding, a way to mollify the shared human guilt of  barbarism.

In making Gods of our fears, and seeking sense of existence as a wasted byproduct for some omniscient grand plan…one discovers there isn’t any to be measured.

Killing is the ultimate zero sum, self destructive act where man is nihilist,and nothing divine.

You can read my musings from the series, in my book Rise-Man/son and the Haunting of the American Madonna, available from the following link or purchase a signed art print:

Man/son Art book

Healter Skelter Art Print

Manly P Hall

“Ignorance fears all things, falling, terror-stricken before the passing wind. Superstition stands as the monument to ignorance, and before it kneel all who realize their own weakness who see in all things the strength they do not possess” ― Manly P Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry: Or the Secret of Hiram Abiff

 Ala Prima| Oil on canvas | 9”x12”

Manly Palmer Hall then, peering from furrowed brow, as if he was trying to cut glass with his eyes and looking for all the world like a matinee idol from the Golden age.  A sort of mystic Valentino for the ages, or at least their Secret Teachings. 

He’s another one of those forgotten esoteric figures on the fringe, who along with Mathers and Blavatsky, are curios lost to the dusty back rooms of new age bookshops, that no doubt used to line Melrose avenue. 
And until a few years back, his magnum opus-The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, would knock you back a few thousand bucks.

Someone who described himself as a “last resort for troubled people” his considerable acuity and palliative voice, lives on at least in lectures on YouTube, which have been accompanying my painting marathons for a while now. His Icosahedron based on the Golden ratio, even found it’s way into my last series for my painting “The Origins of Death”.
In an era that feels like a “monument to ignorance”, the voluminous spiritual wisdom of MPH are like an antidote.

Painted Ala Prima in one sitting, it’s available for purchase from my store from the following link

MPH Portrait

Fait Accomplais

“Christianity is a myth that has been literalised.”
Timothy Freke

Here I am at the opening act for what will be the grand guignol, for my very own book of Revelations.

The first of the last,the meanest story ever had then. Infernal, the Denouement.

For any end, there has to be an origin story, and with that in mind, I suppose it was inevitable that my work would arrive back at the beginning.  I’m thinking of course of Theothantos, my artistic fumbling’s through the quagmire of dogma and mortality. Dealing with those questions back then, carried a lot of heft. With the burden of weighing up the ultimate existential odyssey, I found it easier to reduce the work to the abstract crevices of a skull.

As Henry Miller once pronounced when talking about Tropic of Capricorn, he should have waited until the end of his career to do what he’d tried at the beginning.

Perhaps a decade on, none the wiser, over fifty and certainly more world weary, I feel more able to put flesh on those bones.

And alongside Eliots The Wasteland- I’ve been drawing on some old stalwarts for spiritual encouragement. Goya’s black paintings, Picasso’s later years, Otto Dix’s war etchings, Grunewalds Corpus Christi, Liverpool urban decay from the 70’s.  

Perhaps it’s some sort of fait accomplais, but I want the series to feel like it’s been produced from the vantage point of an artist, journaling the end of days.

I wish I could say it feels like a stretch.

Caught a viral Gough

‘ The idea, that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it, and add their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about, is the grey space in the middle-that grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about”
David Bowie talking about the internet (1999)

2008’s “Incarceration” looks like it finally hit it’s mark, albeit as a meme, but shared no less than over 50,000 times regardless. It’s the kind of stadium level exposure, that being on the cover of Juxtapoz couldn’t have afforded me. Regrettably, the swine who originated the meme, not only neglected to credit my work, but also cropped out my name. Damn!

That would be some fuckery right there, except to say, I’m too old, ugly and block worn to add it to the lifetimes list of personal effrontery’s, back stabs and pass overs, to bend myself too much into a pretzel about it.

I mean, go tell it to Da Vinci.

And as the better David predicted when he invited participating members to download art from his website to rework and deface, it’s an inevitable consequence of the web, that all culture is to be reclaimed and co-opted.

If Art is the last truly democratic roar, then it’s one which has no currency or cachet beyond the one afforded by the viewer, and as a friend of mine supposed,  it’s something of “a back handed compliment” that a long forgotten work, has resurfaced and made such a remarkable, reaching impact.

In these days of columns bloated with divisive opinion, its a measure that my art was able to transcend the boundaries and be relatable on a fundamental human level.
Regardless of the delivery of the medium, it continues to be arts greatest function.

Signed Prints of Incarceration available HERE

 

Bjorn Again

“Horrible things happening to people is inextricably linked to people thinking horrible things might happen to them.”
Ari Aster

Here we go then, once more into the breach, or the beginning of the end if you will.
Series three-“Infernal, The Denouement”-Dark Art Emporium 2021. And I know it seems a ways off, but when you measure your hours in drying paint, months can suddenly collide into years.

You can’t see yet, but this one is going to be about the plague-not the black death you understand, but a disease equally as deadly. The disease of what dear old Hitch described as something that  ‘infects us in our most basic integrity” and that is monotheistic, messianic religion, or at least in its modern incarnation of white, right wing evangelicalism.

Someone who understands this contextually is Ari Aster. His film ‘Midsommar’ on current release is a revelation. Coming off like a kind of bastard offspring that comprises Holy Mountain meets the Wicker Man, Aster is being deceptive when he refers to it as a “break up movie”.. A break up of what exactly?  It’s no accident that the female protagonist Dani’s surname is Ardor and her boyfriends name Christian.

A film redolent with runic rituals and traditions of the Nordic Thule, Aster is clearly aware of its unsavory Nazi antecedents, peppering one of the early scenes with book titles that are a masterclass in Blavatskian thru lines.

In fact it’s a movie lush not just with sumptuous imagery, but a spectacle of clues and pictographs. Art peers down from every corner, echoing, lampooning,or predicting scenes, in what are a myriad of illusionary incantations.

But it’s in the character of Ruben, the grotesquely deformed and disabled child, who is the oracle, seen at the end sitting on a cotton wool cloud, smearing paint abstractly on the pages of the communes sacred book for the priesthood to decipher, where the true dark heart of the story lies.  It’s the mass delusion concocted from archaic ritual madness. The assimilation of a community willing to participate in terrible acts, following an insane edict, for the sake of prosperity and genetic immaculacy.

And Ruben is it’s Godhead, avowed as pure and divine-but an an inbred progeny regardless- whose inflated lips seem to caricature the unmistakable, pneumatic sphincter like pout of a former reality tv host. It’s an eviscerating parody that at its core references eugenics and white supremacy-and as such is one of the most profound statements for the times we live in. What on the surface seems like a contemporary folk horror tale- is in fact an indictment of the pernicious cult of racism and religion.

Having already seen it twice now, I can attest that it is a movie that demands repeated viewings, if only because of how rich it is symbolically, but it is also deeply affecting, beautiful, compelling cinematic work.

It makes me spurred on by my own direction, having ploughed a similar furrow artistically with my piece “The Death Eaters”.

 
It’s a welcome reminder that as dark and bleak as this era is, there are still seeds of extraordinary artistic expression able to inspire and flourish.

Baby Boomer

9″ x 12″-Oil on wood panel

So whats up with that cover then ?

It’s actually an update of the original cover painting I did back in ’94, which was taken from a sequence where our hero-Mortimer-references a dream he’s had where all the babies have been born with a congenital absence of eyelids. Its a really short passage, but at the time I think I felt it was symbolic of this internal life, a sensory inflection where the only point of reference is the womb.
 
I was probably also thinking of that razor meets eyeball scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, but here its a surgeons scalpel about to shock the little tot into what amounts to a kind of rebirth.

At the time, Fantaco-the company that originally solicited the series-were so concerned by the image, the editor called me to ask if I could change it to something more “T & A” such were the times then. I wouldn’t, they cancelled the series, and the rest is 25 years of forgotten history.

It’s up and available in my store for purchase along with the 25th Anniversary edition.
BABY BLIND

POST MORTIMER 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Here it is at long last then, unfinished business, a monkey on my back, 25 years in the making.

I even knocked a special little trailer together, in the vintage style of all those late night thrillers from the period 1979.  Such were my ambitions back in the days of 1995, I  envisioned David Croneberg would direct if it had been optioned to film, and Gary Oldman would have played the old pathological pathologist, Sue Johnson his wife Joan, and Nicole Kidman the luscious visage of Lucinda.



While we can dream what that might have looked like, here’s the completed graphic novel, cleaned up,completely re lettered digitally, and available for the very first time, in its 86 page glory.

POST MORTIMER