View from Abridge

“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let them know how dreadful war is, and to stimulate peoples powers of resistance”
Otto Dix.

“What’s the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

So details for my part, 2019, the stillborn Paradiso’s fall an abridged version.
Resembles a Lynchian comic strip, or the trimester of  something unspeakable.
A fairly accurate summary of the year then, peering as we are, back into the black abyss of a decade, that began with such promise, but as Chuck Palahnuik once mooted, switched to being a threat.
For myself, that means the future holds no better prospect than the paint that will continue to flow in tandem with the inevitable deluge of blood and tears the coming era will define.

See you all on the other side of the easel then.

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.


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The Divine and the Divined

18″x 18″
Oil on panel

My own contribution from the recent Tales from the Darkside show at LaBodega.

Rather drolly-or should I say troll-y, I got some push back on this when I posted it on social media from the usual self righteous quarters. How oddly ironic, that the dogmatic ever entreat that they be accepted in every faction of existence, yet never seem willing to extend the same courtesy themselves. 

Happy Holidays from Starbucks anyone?

Regardless, they are a ways off the mark in their usual bobble headed outrage for this one.
It was originally planned for the series I’m working on “Paradiso’s Fall”, which has become something of a vignette of ill omens, pointing towards what I perceive as man kinds inevitable demise. I’m hearing the term “personal apocalypse” coined a lot since I first used it some months back, but I believe it’s a predisposition inherent within us all.

This piece, portraying the mother-the holy vessel or paragon of virtue, literally transformed to the symbol of that final nail, is just merely another emblem of a paternally manifested future, inherently pushed to its own end. If you’d have said “Enola Gay” and “Little Man”you’d have been on the money.

Anyone who further missed the point, clearly didn’t see the whacking great atomic symbol, smack bang at the center of the piece. But then, I daresay nuclear proliferation in the hands of a madman who loves to push buttons, barely warrants a  semblance of grey matter either.
The worm coiling from the cuff, is just a further token of dehumanization, as we slither back toward the primal dirt from whence we came.

So perhaps its biblical after all.

Wrath

Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword.”

Revelation 6:4

Wrath
Oil on Canvas
36″ x 48″

And so a bloodied harbinger, one of John of Patmos’s magic mushroom induced four. Like a butchers castoff wrenched from the pit of Hades, gallops the crimson steed stripped of its artifices. Give it up then for deaths own points man, here to cleave empires into ferocious war and division. Hooray!
Here he is, sporting the latest fall fashions- jodhpurs and jackboots, along with a swordfish head resembling a Klansman’s hood or a papal Mitre: a false crown for hell’s Borgia general: the preferred head dress of demagogues and blood thirsty zealots. There’s enough in the capes fountain to quench them I believe.  And if there’s any doubt as to which festering dark stable unleashed our Mr (D)Ed, then a blind, rabid diamondback coils from the animated corpses cold dead fist – Gadsen’s relic co-opted as every risible little bumper sticker-now waving into view like Satan’s own spewing cock.

If after all of that, you missed the carrion call of our horseback messenger, the lightning bolt clutched aloft also trebles as a Sig rune, cross and spear of destiny. Talk about the unholy trinity of Swiss army knives eh?
No prizes for guessing what fireworks awaits at the finish line, but I’d wear sunblock if I were you.

Yes, I realize I’m posting this on Independence day, but look-I began this one on 12,21,12- the Aztec dooms date-so  this piece was forged for these end times.
So here we are, July 4th baring down upon this once great nation like funerary pallbearer-one more last supper culminating in a glittering firecracker of whizz bang and char grilled offal.
How depressingly apt, eh?
Two plus millennia that includes a historical cannon of almost mythological prowess-names like Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy echoing through the grand halls of history, all diminished by the wet, shrill, reverberating fart of a coiffed, bloviating, bowel, tweeting in an ill fitting suit. An ignoble and all too fitting end I suppose, if only because the American dream has become a nightmare.

Nostrovia Comrades.

If we’re all still here come November, it’ll be on view at Copro’s upcoming Underworld group show.

Years End 2016

Here comes the fire
Our funeral pyre, baby”

Neil Hannon with the Divine Comedy-Here Comes the Flood

So 2016-the year of the reaper, the year the world lost its collective Reality TV-addled mind and went full tilt Walking Dead.
If the year began with the untimely passing of my greatest idol, it ends with a morticians pool that feels akin to some kind of celebrity rapture. Lest we forget the real horrors of Aleppo and Orlando. death toll the bell.

November brought another death, the year America got a malignant tumor and instead of performing a routine biopsy, decided to vote en masse to let the carcinoma riddle its way like a scourge through every vital organ. Prognosis isn’t good, and it currently lies choking its last, toxic gargled breath on a hallucinatory diet of hate and bitter rancor, stale 1950’s apple pie peppered with Cheeto dust and bullshit.  Experts are worried that unless the infection is contained, it may reach epidemic proportions with mass casualty.

Indeed.

Glibs aside, this sad sack year was party to the loss of two friends and an uncle to cancer. Fuck cancer.

It’s certainly no accident then that the compilation of works from the year, heavily feature some sort of death’s head motif.

On the other hand, my Art career has never looked more buoyant, so there’s that. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.

The supporters, the curators, the gallery’s, my wife, my family and friends.

No small blessings.

And in the post-Brexit, Trumpocalypse, what prospect for the year’s turn one wonders? The totalitarian pall of 1930’s Weimar Germany, the shadow of a reemerging cold war, a civil war, a race war, economic meltdown, genocide, the annihilation of the entire world at the infantile trigger-tweet finger of a despotic lunatic?  Take your pick.

I’ll be in my studio daubing as the world burns.

No better time than the end times after all.