"the Ghost of Medusa"
Oil on Canvas
12" x 24"
The mornings are starting to cool, and a dense mist hangs over the wild palms.
I love this time of year.
I've been in a bit of a fog myself this past week, waking in the middle of a night in a frenzy, freaking about the last minute preps for the forthcoming exhibits, living on four hours a night, and beginning each day swirling palettes and consuming copious amounts of tea.
I shalln't truly find the sleep of the dead until the last stroke.
I suppose I'm a man possessed-off the charts and obsessively compulsively picking at the scab of everything I do.
There's some of that in this latest piece I suppose-'The Ghost of Medusa'-though truly its something I've been working towards for twenty years. There are half realized traces of it in drawings I did as far back as 85, it's eerie. Was it prescient or just self fulfilled prophesy? Who cares-I'm in love with the piece-it feels like the herald of a new direction. It's realisation was organic and as natural as breathing-if I must annotate though, it partly has its foundation in the quote from Jack London's novel-'The Mutiny of Elsinor'', which I discovered very recently. In it he says-
"...Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Mayan-Lie (illusion)"
For myself, those words encompass perfectly life's deflections from the shadows of the night.
Along with my continuing obsession with the cosmic resonance of the number three-(Medusa was part of a trinity of Gorgons), I should relate that my dead friend Martin had completed a drawing of Medusa before he died. It hadn't occurred to me until I was working on it. The arc continues.
I have perhaps two more pieces in me before delivery date-though something of a backtrack in the sense that they shall compliment the last gasp of the original Theothanatos series.
Onward and upwards.
Bring it.
I've been sorting through some old backup disks, and I found some things from over a decade ago, and being a generous sort, I thought it might be quite nice to share a variety of work and photographs, and the memories they stir, with you all. So I guess if you are interested in seeing where I was and what I was doing a little over ten years ago, read on.
Around thirteen years ago, I had a little studio on Market street in Birkenhead called New Age comics. Being modest, I thought I was going to be bigger than Neil Gaiman, writing and producing my own comic books.
The area was being revitalized as an arts quarter, and I remember that my studio was next door to some multi media exponent. I never quite figured out what it was they did, other than a penchant for illegal substances.
One night, the local council threw a big shin-dig, and invited a bunch of cronies over to review there investments, and whilst I had wine and Phillip Glass playing, my neighbours had a rave-all flashing lights and banks of make shift monitors showing bad 3d. I was greatly amused to see these old ladies and men in tweed jackets, horrified by the coked out throng in there.
I also remember some artist with another studio,who had crocheted a huge vagina at entrance of the door.
What a shame I don't have pictures of that.
In the foreground are copies of the first issue of Post Mortimer which I self published. I've no idea how I scratched a living, probably bits of graphics and such, but I think I had around 200 copies made, which I managed to sell out on. It garnered some great review's in Comics world etc, and luminaries like Al Davison and Steve Bissette contacted me to tell me how much they loved it. The paintings you see on the wall were enlarged frames from the comic-sort of Lichtenstienesque I guess.
The first issues cover, which was fairly confrontational for a front cover at the time. It came from a dream I'd had were all the babies had been born with a congenital absence of eyelids, and I wrote the nightmare into the protagonists story. The tale was about an ageing mortician called Mortimer with a fear of his own mortality, and an unnaturally unrequited yearning for one of his corpses. I called it Post Modernist techno angst in a cardigan.What a pretentious tosser I was.
The second issue cover, and the issue that broke me. I did another 200 run of the first issue, and had 500 of these printed. I also tried to make it regular comic book format, little realising that what made the first one stand out (other than its scary cover) was its odd size. Still, its better than the first issue, and though it didn't sell as well as the first, the plaudits kept coming so I battled on to finish the third and final issue.
Unfortunately, the rent was killing me, and I had to move to a new location-a shared space with a band and a dance troupe.The drawing above is a view out of the window. Very entertaining, but not conjusive to business, because I wasn't as visible anymore. In the end I conceded to get a proper job-such is life. I'd still love to publish all three issues into a graphic novel someday.
Below are some never before seen pages from the third issue...
Below is a picture taken a week before I moved out of the studio, taken by photographer and my best friend at the time John Liddy. I look about twelve, and I was pretty stressed that day and perturbed because he'd turned up unannounced, just to snap some shots. John was bisexual and I guess he had a bit of a thing for me. It was cool, we were still best friends, Afterward's, we went to the Copperfield pub across the road and had a blazing row about something. It was one of the last times I saw him, because pretty soon afterward, he had a massive heart attack and died.
Beneath are the two self portraits I did around the time of his death. Things were going badly during my first marriage, and I would get tanked up on Southern Comfort and lemonade, and whatever else I could get my hands on-I think I was on peroxetine which is an anti depressant too. Looking at them now, the images are fairly visceral and filled with self loathing, but I really like the abandoned way I threw the paint on.
You can't tell from the scan,but the first one has a bunch of journal pages I'd ripped up and pasted to the canvas before painting over them. The rest of my journals I burned in a midnight BBQ
At weekends, I'd to take long introspective walks on Bidston Hill, which was close to were I lived, and one hot summer some kids had set fire to the brush there, and one particular Sunday, I was taken with how much the landscape seemed to reflect my inner turmoil perfectly. 'Disposition on the Hill' was the result.
Meanwhile, because of the cocktail of substances I was using at the time and my own mortal unrequited yearnings for someone, I painted these two fragile musings called 'The Liar' and 'The Lover'.
Finally, throughout my life, I've always kept sketchbooks, a majority of which sit collecting dust in my mothers attic, but the pages overflow with visual snapshots, be it of my kids asleep, family visits or my surrealist renderings of the time.
I hope you've enjoyed my little retread through my past, and perhaps one day I'll post some more.
Its been something like twenty five years since Martin died-hard to believe sometimes-I still see his face so clearly.
Maybe its getting older, but he's been in my thoughts a lot of late. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen on what was known as a 'Youth Training scheme' in those days, and Martin headed the design dept. I guess he recognized some modicum of talent in me then, and it quickly became one of those things of mentor and student. He introduced me to things like Dada and Pop Art, and a set of skills and dictum's that still stand me in good stead today.
He was also a remarkable artist in his own right, producing a series of silk screened images, that had a foot somewhere between Fauvism and photography. He possessed an incredibly dry surreal wit too, which would spill over into projects like painting over sized crisp packets that he had blown up on an old OHP. I recall hours of laughter, and we became firm friends, outside the class.He was 29 when he died in that old blue mini of his from France, which he had customized with red tape. Out of all the friends that I've lost over the years, the shock of his death was the most visceral,I guess because it was so sudden and unexpected,and at the time I dealt with it by mythologizing his death, stupidly, naively casting him as my Carlos Casagemas, but his passing was fundemental to me, and I really miss him sometimes.
Last year, I tried to deal with it, the way I deal with everything-through paint-and had the idea of producing a hommage triptych, which I'd call 'Mentors'-I never got past the first piece(I'd still like to) -but the piece here called simply 'Martin' is the result.
"the Ghost of Medusa"
