The Shore

"The Shore" 1994
Acrylic on canvas

He're's a curious little painting I just rediscovered from the archives, circa mid 90's.

Someone I was emulating for about five minutes was Graham Sutherland , and for all his influence I like it much better in retrospect than I did at the time.

It was painted following a holiday in Cumbria,where I remember the fallen trees lining the lakes, made me think of rotting torso's washed up on the shore.

There may be the odd cadaver beneath those cold waters.

Interestingly, the tree motif of twisted roots and peeling bark has found its way into a lot of subsequent work.

Something for the Weekend-Golden Years?

We ought to be in the first throws of Autumn, except it feels like we are in the clutches of an Indian summer.

However,I carry the timbres of fall regardless of the season.

The new Ghost is called Mentors Shadow-informed definitely by the idea of my 'holy' Triumvirate piece unraveling to reveal the vivacious spirit instilled by friends passing. I certainly would'nt be as passionate about the notion of legacy, were it not for realising the finiteness of a mortal life.

That is the cruel irony of what I do I imagine.

Travelblog-In my Liverpool home.

When I left England a little over five years ago, I had determined that it had failed me. To my mind,it had never supported my ambitions or elevated me from my humble provincial origins, and I sensed pretty early on, the hopelessness of it ever being a foundation for me to build my life on.

Moreover, I scoffed at my hometown of Liverpool ever being a cultural epicenter for the arts, railing that it had traded for too long on the currency of four moptops who fucked off and changed the world, and having scraped that particular barrel for all its worth, could only ever again procure scum from its depths.
Never would it be anything more than a bitter catchphrase of low life's and lowly living, a Harry Enfield caricature of gobby yobs in trackies, a Boys from the Blackstuff cliche of dossers, thieves and sociopaths. Whilst the city would ever bare the psychological scars of little Jamie Bulger's death, at the hands of two of its 11 year old sons.
Returning for ten days then, was something of a revelation. Of course I could have been seeing it all through the ghastly fog of jetlag, which I tried in vain to rectify with sleeping pills at night, and the high fructose diet of triple redbulls by day, but it appears to be very much a city reinvigorated by futurist architecture and glossy American style malls, and a vigor for the new.

But if there is a life there for me, then lest we forget why I was there to begin with-the prodigal son and all that, to the bosom of my family go I. And what a wonderful, delightful in all its complexity gallery of relatives I have. We are all getting older, and I don't think I ever realised how much I missed them, how much I took them for granted, until I was with them again.
And of course, I am a doting Grandfather.
Oh little Quinn, all the wonder and glorious travails of life ahead in those little, curious blue eyes. All furrowed brow, peach complexion and sweet little grunts. He is the most beautiful and precious thing.
So much crammed in such a short time, ten hundred snapshots of English idyll, fish and chips and tea and scones.Crumbling Roman walls in Chester, ostentious guilded Pre Raphaelites in Port Sunlight, misty Mersey drizzle, Dali at the Tate.

Now I'm back,having burned the candle both ends, and endured a fourteen hour delay in Philadelphia, I am suffering a serious bout of the flu. I slept eleven hours last night, and my head feels like its full of cement, but I am glad to be 'home'-for I feel I can call it that now.

Head Candy-And into the sea goes pretty England and me

I'm growing weary of America daily-the political and cultural intransigence, the dumbing down and elevation of ordinariness, the raging passive aggression of everything-and its not that the US is unique in any of this, lord knows England is no sepia tinted Merchant Ivory ideal of afternoon tea and fancies either, it just feels at times like having your head encased in concrete.
I really had no concept of what it meant to be passive aggressive before I moved here, and I need to stop reading shit on the internet,blinkered vitriolic opinion-and I realise the irony of me stating as much, but its toxic, and does little for my misanthropy.
I hunger for our return to England shores again in April.

Heres a Blur with 'this is a low' from an album that makes me think of drinking hot tea in London cafes in the rain.

Notes from an Easel-Part 63-Kiss of Death.

Found my second wind today, and spent the afternoon in the seclusion of my studio, working up a new skull piece. I've wanted to put the stark white of bone against a blood crimson background for a while-it has a Valentines chocolate box appeal I guess, so I'm calling it 'the Kiss of Death.'
However, three days in, and I've been neglecting my daily sketch, although preparations have been so frantic, I've barely been able to doodle on a post-it.Suffice to say that they shall be reinstated tomorrow.

Here is a picture of my cat Ronin then, looking like butter wouldn't melt in his maw. Would you believe that this is the same cat who terrorizes his sister Pepper, steals my brushes, walks on my wet canvases and laid a sloppy stank egg on my rug yesterday morning? Snow white demon from Hades on cocaine.


Speaking of lethal white powders, I am told that my hometown is currently in the grip of a suffocating blanket of ice, not felt since the bitter winter of 81.
Undeterred, my heavily pregnant daughter-Emma-, trekked an hour through the tundra to her art college to discover it closed before walking back. It alarmed me terribly when I found out, but that's the kind of tenacity and determination that little girl is made of-she reminds me so much of myself, and I am incredibly proud.

Tomorrow I ought to be able to complete the new piece, before the weekend and our next stop at the Hive in LA.

And Another Thing-Margaret Thatcher, the death of the British Empire

'When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross...'
Sinclair Lewis-1935
Fifteen years ago, an intransigent, extreme and archaic, dictatorship was ousted from office by her own party, following an elected third term in the UK.Though its true to say, that the beginnings of Margaret Thatchers terrible reign, brought an end to a period in the seventies of union discontent, it also brought with it a harsh and cold winter which lasted twelve long years.

During her term in office, Britain endured the Falklands war, The Westland Affair, the end of the coal and the shipping industry, the privatization of the railways, BT, the electric and water boards, the beginnings of the end for the NHS, the reinstated Taxes- Poll Tax (abolished in the sixteenth century), and inheritance tax (a tax which ensures you still pay after your death) , eight million unemployed (the conservative estimate after the book cooking of training schemes).Education cuts and Mad Cow disease (CJD), the re-emergance of puritanical censorship with the moral guardianship of the nanny state. Hillsborough, Dunblane, Charring cross, race and poll tax riots in the streets and a further polarization of negotiations with the IRA. Even my own hometown of Liverpool was abandoned by the Iron Lady to what she proposed as a 'Managed Decline'

 
And whilst the maggots flourished and grew complacently bloated, the poor became more emaciated, and what they call the class divide in England became a chasm.
As the country descended further into the bowels of Hades however, the machinations behind number ten maneuvered, and I watched as a tearful Thatcher was removed from Downing street. It was the only emotion I ever saw her betray.The dark days of the right were numbered, and there was a sense that the working class-through music, through art and culture, were on the move.

 

It's hard for me to reminisce the hope and promise of those times-but when Labour swept in again after so long, with D-reams song 'Things can only get better', it felt like watching life reanimating a corpse.Of course, history has shown that hopes are in vain, that the mess left in the Thatcher years was too far reaching -lopping off a limb is no good when the cancer has spread, but at the very least, the Conservatives were viewed as an aberrant joke-a terrible wrong footing that was the catalyst for the end an empire, a country were it was twenty five years too late for its terrible former premier to be diagnosed with dementia.

I prefix this, because in the insanity of the birther movement, the spitting sloganeering of the teabaggers, the endless, impending, end of days fervor of the evangelists -I see all too well, the failings of my own countries past.
 
The dark unwillingness for change-an unwillingness, that comes spitting the vitriol of judgment, cloaked between the pages of the bible and a pocketful of race hatred. An angry mob, without a taste for irony, resembling the fascist diatribes of the 30's, much more than the institution and leader elect, they are demonizing, all stoked by their own ignorance and those special interests, who balk at change simply because they may end up a little light on change in their pocket.

Perhaps its as Churchill once said, a country does elect the leader it deserves, but having seen the terrible legacy of the Thatcher years, and those still being cast by the long shadow of Bush, it doesn't behoove one to imagine the kind of cretinous demagogue that could be borne from the bastard offspring of a Limbaugh and Beck.