Battling Demons

"And when the barrator had disappeared, he turned his talons upon his companion and grappled with him right above the moat. But sooth the other was a doughty sparhawk. To clapperclaw him well and both of them fell in the middle of the boiling pond"

Dante-Divine comedy-Inferno: Canto XXII

Dante had been expelled from his native Florence by the time he wrote his magnum opus. Battle worn from the conflict with the Ghibelline’s in Campaldino, betrayed and exiled following his rift with the Papacy, and heart sick following the death of his unrequited beloved-Beatrice, the long descent through the circles of Hell must have seemed like a refreshing morning stroll by comparison.

No such reprieve from the hell and damnation that has been this year unfortunately. Pandemic still hanging like a biblical pall, while the straitjacket of institutional racism becomes torn at the fabric of Americas seams. Hardly surprising and frankly-long overdue, given the four hundred millennia that includes a legacy of human chattel, lynchings,segregation and injustice.  Add the imperfect storm of endless black by blue murders, and four rancorous years of ear bleeding dog whistles, and we find the median that was Junes gloom, drowning in it’s inevitable, turbulent, flood. 

 So there’s a lot of that informing this latest piece, the Inferno’s battling demons-Calcabrina and Alchin-talons drawn and teeth barred as they fall into the seething black pitch-a ready made conflict that conjured for me at least, not only the fractured divide between the white Guelph’s and black Guelph’s that vexed Dante’s era, but the racial one that has spanned from the Mauritanians in Visigoth’s Europa, the riots in my native Toxteth back in 82, through to present day America.

Along with it, my own redress to not fall on the sword of only ‘paint what you know”, because broadening ones palette should always extend literally, if we are to confront the white demons of our own.

Mother’s Superiority Complex

” Those midwives to history, put on their bloody robes"
― David Bowie-Teenage Wildlife.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

A fellow artist recently noted , how prescient my prior series must seem, given the times we find ourselves in. Another friend charitably referred to me as a conduit.

Believe me, it gives me little comfort to see the turmoil of my inner landscape, reflected on any real one.  And following that train for a moment, I should perhaps be more than a little unnerved, given that the new series is subtitled “the denouement”.

Except, as someone who see’s themselves as possibly more of an anthropologist than an artist,  I’m no more unique than anyone who views history as just writing on the wall.

For instance, here’s a particularly unpleasant character whose been seeding her way through my sketches for quite a few years now. With her withering stink eye, I suppose she’s come to represent a certain, old, righteous indignation. A glowering factotum, judging disapprovingly at the viewers prying gaze from beneath her cowl, whilst yielding fealty to the most reprehensible of deeds.

There’s a lot of that about lately, given that a whole segment of society clings to the boast that 100,000 deaths would be the results of someone performing a very good job, whilst another sits blissfully deluded by the notion that C-19 is all just a conspiratorial hoax.

We should all be so lucky.

At any rate, I’ve no doubt that heat they feel, isn’t just from feet being held to the fire, but the dial turning all the way up to total hell unleashed on earth.

So whilst we wait for the full toll, I entreat everyone to stay safe, stay home and make a sanctuary of yourself.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Gods Monkey

“Any progress toward the salvation of humankind will probably begin from the bottom—when our gods have been devalued to the status of refrigerator magnets or lawn ornaments.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

Oil on canvas
9″x 12″
(2019)

The title actually comes from a David Sylvian/Robert Fripp track of the same name, which contains the lines;”Born in darkness-Built on shame-And hurting”.
Wow.
Potent stuff.

The painting was borne out of quite an old pen and ink drawing from 2015 I think, resurrected as a sort of lodestar for my next series, but it struck me recently whilst eliciting research, that the meat and sandwich of the whole end quest, was going to be some sort of reckoning with God-a visual trial by fire if you will, and by that same task= man, since y’know…chicken and egg.

Like I say, potent stuff, so our primate here is a little totem of modern piety, a paradox of hypocrisy and sanctimony.

It’s available in my store for a different kind of song from the following link. HERE

The next thing

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”
T S Eliot. The Wasteland

So here you have it, this is me signing on for more of the same madness for what will be the forseeable two years. No rest for the wicked or maybe even the witless -who can say. Infernal, the Denouement- the final in a three part series, that started with Purgatorium in 2012.

As with the last two series, I’ll be using a literary springboard to jump start my visual ideas, this time in no less a monumental work than T.S.Eliot’s”The Wasteland”. That’s quite heavy stock for the stew right there.

Given that the opening lines begin “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land”, should give one an inkling of where I’m coming from-this being April and all.
No set date yet, but Infernal will open in 2021 at The Dark Art Emporium.
The end is nigh.