Mining Tour

“Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper.”
Charles Bukowski.

The first proper work from the new studio then, and I’ve taken the literal bull by the horns, or at least the Minotaur.

I’m following a tradition of course that spans from the Chauvet caves, the Canaanite God Moloch,  to the Labyrinth, through the gates of the Seventh circle of the Dantes Inferno, all the way to Picasso easel and beyond,  but the beastly half man/half bull progeny of Pasiphae, threads it’s way through the culture of our collective subconscious, like a primal avatar.

There are moments when I relate to the Bovine headed creature of Crete, locked away in a dark subterranean maze of my own making, especially in the face of such days as these.
It’s not until I leave the studio on occasion and venture down the mountain to the local town that the outside-like Theseus wielding his club-gets in, as it did today, standing in line at the grocery store.

Shelves ransacked of produce and toiletries, lines out the door, as peoples carts brimmed over with canned goods, water jugs, frozen food, pasta-a surreal precursor to some Steven King inspired nightmare.

It’s the lemming fever of hysteria of course, a literal viral panic about a pandemic that has people, literally shitting themselves in their quest to hoard enough soft ply, to wipe every arse from here to Wuhan. When Plato imagined the end of the Republic,  I daresay he didn’t foresee the hoarding of toilet roll as a harbinger to a populace prepping to watch it from their enamel thrones.

Still, it’s a frigid poke in the collective small of ones back, one that reminds us that society is ever fragile, and a single crisis away from teetering into bedlam and chaos. 
A sobering reminder that all it will take, is a spark of righteous entitlement, to ignite the kindling that has been the unraveling landscape of these past four years.

Because bulls fare better in labyrinths than in grocers shops.