The Tower

Oil on canvas-20″ x 24″, $1,500

And now for something completely different.
Commissioned as part of an Astral themed 78 Tarot project, this one was something of a fun diversion, combining  all the sci-fi elements that would have utterly enamored my ten-year-old self. It’s something of an homage I suppose to all those 2000ad Future shock covers I would pour over for hours, in the hopes of one day becoming one of their retinue of Art droids.
That never happened of course,  and I’m much happier digging the dark furrow I currently do, but as 2000ad turns 40 and I hit my half century next month, it’s worth acknowledging the influences that informed me.

Original Painting

I’ve knocked together a cover of how it might have looked for shits and giggles. One can imagine a Tharg future shock that might accompany it. Something perhaps about ET’s sending space monkeys back in time to populate humanity.

Below is the obligatory bumf to go with the Tarot booklet

“Humanities aspiration has been one that has forever fixed it’seyes heavenward. If the stars were ciphers to map our destiny, then the looming edifices throughout history seem constructed as a means to reach them. Perhaps it is man’s desire to be closer to the source, Godlike in his eternal spiritual quest to elevate himself from mere mortality. And yet, like the fall of empires past that litter history, man’s arrogance and indignance seem’s always beset by self-destruction and the primal need to reconstruct the natural order.

And so Gods of old are supplanted by interstellar Gods, the desire to fill the void of fallen doctrines (as in the dead hollow tree) with the hope that we are not alone in the universe, that something larger than ourselves stands forever on the periphery, pulling strings. And yet our limited knowledge and ineptitude leave us stumbling around like simians in space, our search for enlightenment, stunted by fear of the unknown, ever ready to crack the skull of a different race with a nearby stone, because our need to feel superior in the microcosm will always usurp any progress, and lesson that could be learned. And as with the ouroboros, we are lost in the cosmic cycle of death, symbolized by the crystal skull.

The Tower then, is a parable of facade, an ephemeral artifact manufactured by the conceit of ego, built on the sands of eternal folly, that could come crashing down in an instant of catastrophic epiphany.”

Who watches the watchmen

It's the 25th Anniversary of Chernobyl today, so one could be forgiven for thinking that this study was painted as a response to that.

In actuality, it was more generally about paranoia, the notion that depending on one's belief, something all knowing, omnipotent and powerful sits forever on the periphery watching our every move. It could be God, Big Brother or Extraterrestrial depending on your preference.

As a nice aside, My wife thought it looked like the cover of an old pulp novel, so I threw together a quick comp, just for fun in Photoshop.

Artifact-Tales of an Antiquarian-Mothers Milk

Any artist who was a child between 70 and 85 will attest to having gone through their Giger period. Mine began upon seeing 'Alien' on home vhs sometime in 1980, and didn't really bare fruit until sometime in 2003. The Biodegradables-(: or biomechanics and degradation combined-geddit?) had their origins in Gigers morphic automotons, my own existential angst combined with the decaying shipyards of my Liverpool home town, and what is in retrospect an early projenitor to Steampunk.

As immediate predecessors to the mythical transience of the mermaid paintings, it was all very telling, and I really ought to have continued tapping that vein, because I could have been inhabiting the same demographic as Chris Mars by now,(yeah,right) but as is always the case, the need to make money won out.

Sadly, the series was shortlived, to the point that there were only four paintings ever produced. One of those pieces-'Mothers Milk'- tackled the same themes in a majority of my art-that of origin-in this case the notion that we are all contaminated from conception, through predisposition of our genetics and those of our surroundings.

For all their obvious derivation, of the countless pieces I produced in the early noughties, the Biodegradables still stand up for me as works I'm really proud of.