Title Series

It's a month away until showtime.

Even the icy tundra of the early morning studio, can't deter me from the last haul, as I defrost, warming my hands by the space heater, and with bottomless mugs of tea . 

As the final piece nestles on the easel, the juggling frenzy of photographing the pieces and varnishing them before framing extends the working day, long into the evening. 

It's afforded me the distance of looking over the entire collection, without that constant niggling feeling that I want to tickle a corner or start over. 

I can tell you that the material comprises what I believe to be some of my most powerful, unsettling and uncompromising work to date. Truly, serpentine anima for the dark period it's been created in.

I'm very happy and proud of the whole series.

Whilst I can't reveal the works yet, the titles at least should give you some semblance of what to expect. As the Tempest was to Purgatorium, some of the titles for Paradiso's Fall are taken from passages of Milton's Paradise Lost. Others were directed from specific content. Here then-in the order I hope to exhibit them-are the titles.

1 What's Dark Within, Illuminate.

2 Where Death and Nature Breeds

3 The Voyage of Elen

4 The Death Eaters

5 The Origins of Life

6 The Origins of Death

7 Origins of a Black Hole

8 Ages of Hopeless End

9 For Want of Other Prey

Other possible titles were 'To Put it Mildly', 'Long and Prayerful Consideration' 'Chaos Judge the Strife' and 'Sacrament of the White Knights', so make of those what you will.
 

Also uncompromising, was Tomi Ungerer, who I read with real sadness, passed away recently. As I wrote in a previous post from 2009, upon first seeing Tomi's work in his book-Testament-at Liverpool's library in the 1980's had a profound effect on me. "his work peels back the thinly veiled skin to reveal the stark bone of societies distemper beneath."

And whilst some would say that 87 years of age is a good innings, it seems pretty unfair that he's gone, given a certain former 'reality' TV host still breathes to spread misery and woe, but then I guess as with Newtons third law, 'everything has an equal and opposite reaction'

I highly recommend 'Far out isn't far enough' if you haven't seen it-I think it was on Netflix, but beg, borrow or steal a copy.

Enjoy the silence.

 “One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

It looks like I'm staring off into the abyss, pondering the muddy expanse of the soiled nothing, but it's actually that first contemplative pause before something happens, in a space fertile with possibility. It allows the chance as the song by Depeche Mode said, to enjoy the silence.

As the year comes to a close, it's no accident that the piece I'm planning is about the heralding of a new dawn.

In the other spaces in between, I've been reading Chris Hedges new book-"America the farewell tour." Distressing raw meat for a series that is peppered with ill omens hurtling us towards the end times. Take me at my sarcastic best, when I say that if his previous tome-"American Fascism" is a side splitter, this one will put you on the floor. 
At any rate, the irony isn't lost, given that it arrived during a four day power outage, while a place called Paradise burned itself out of existence. Lest we forget the horticulture tips in response,procured from the odious shitgibbon in chief.

The whole thing left a somber cloud that hasn't loomed as bleakly since Cormac McCarthys the Road.

In the face of what Hedges propounds as Durkeim's anomie in real time, it's hard to see a way forward, to not sense that all of our tomorrows shall be a continued assault of cyclical traumas, imposed by the will of a small dogmatic proportion of the populous, intent on nihilism, subjugation and extinction.  If my previous series-Purgatorium-was partially informed by Artaud's essay -"Van Gogh, the man suicided by society", then this one ascribes to a society, in essence suiciding itself.

Whatever hope then, can only come with the vast expanse of ideas, from the reflective silences pregnant with possibility. 

Otherwise, the only sound left to hear will be humanities final death rattle.


. 

Mother Deer.

You can’t really tell yet, but that’s Elen I’m painting, the lost pagan horned goddess of British folklore.
She’s Mama deer, spiritual consort, Shamanic pathfinder of ley lines and a divine fertility being.

That’s quite a bad ass resume, except to say that like most Pagan figures, it wasn’t enough for her Christian brethren, who gave her a historical make over and renamed her St Helena.

Still, her new turn as a latter day Lara Croft, seeker of relics such as the Holy Sepulcher and Christs Cross is fascinating on its own merit. Even if it meant desecrating the Temple of Venus in 333AD (Jesus in Hebrew for anyone who wondered) and relinquishing her female empowerment card, by re-erecting what John Allegro in his book ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ called a ‘Phallic Symbol of ecstatic fertility and Resurrection’.

Its as close to Eve as I’ll get in my series about fallen Eden I suppose.

Having seen both ‘Annihilation’ and ‘Mother’ recently, it struck me that perhaps I’m plundering similar furrow as far as the cultural zeitgeist is concerned. Mankind being the great corrupter and pathogen in the garden and all that. Mother nature made barren by eschatology.  Although I didn’t really like either movie to be honest, and I suspect ‘Mother’ to be more of that directors bitter sentiments on being an ‘artiste’ in Hollywood.

Go tell it to Kubrick, Darren.

If my series, Purgatorium, ended with a piece featuring John Locke pointing the way  like a wise old owl, then Paradiso’s Fall is imbued with the myth of America as his Tabula Rasa.

One of the phrases from Miltons Paradise lost that jumped out at me as a foundation for the series was ‘The mind in it’s own place..can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

So much of our personal Eden’s will always be tainted by expectation.

It’s something to bare in mind as I’m bearing fruit.