Baby Boomer

9″ x 12″-Oil on wood panel

So whats up with that cover then ?

It’s actually an update of the original cover painting I did back in ’94, which was taken from a sequence where our hero-Mortimer-references a dream he’s had where all the babies have been born with a congenital absence of eyelids. Its a really short passage, but at the time I think I felt it was symbolic of this internal life, a sensory inflection where the only point of reference is the womb.
 
I was probably also thinking of that razor meets eyeball scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, but here its a surgeons scalpel about to shock the little tot into what amounts to a kind of rebirth.

At the time, Fantaco-the company that originally solicited the series-were so concerned by the image, the editor called me to ask if I could change it to something more “T & A” such were the times then. I wouldn’t, they cancelled the series, and the rest is 25 years of forgotten history.

It’s up and available in my store for purchase along with the 25th Anniversary edition.
BABY BLIND

Rasputin

Oil on canvas,
9″x 12″

With Russia in the news again, I thought it’d be quite nice to trot out one of the Slavs other infamous sons- the Mad Monk, Grigori Rasputin-Alla Prima.

He’s another of those fascinating esoteric cult figures, from the time of the Romnovs, ministering all manner of occult practices from Theosophy to being faith healer to Tsar Nicholas’s son, Alexei.

A nice gig if you can get it, particularly if  the laying on of hands extends to the local nunnery.

Ongoing rumors of an affair and his influence over the Tsarina Alexandra, that such were the times then, it wasn’t too long before he was knocked off, although given that it took an afternoon buffet of arsenic laced cakes and wine, three bullets-one in the forehead- and dropping in the frigid Nevka waters to do the trick, may lend to the reputation of his mystical prowess, and the rumor that he did a zombie Jesus.

Regardless, the fall of the Romanovs wasn’t too far behind.

One hopes a similar fate awaits the current US dynasty.

Aldous Huxley

“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Another painted sketch, flexing the painted portrait muscles, while I busy myself for the next series. In this picture,Huxley reminds me of a cross between Jarvis Cocker and myself in my early 20’s .  I think that’s around the time I first read Brave New World. Then of course, it was still a work of fiction, or at least a cautionary tale. Like Orwell’s 1984, I suppose its become a sort of manifesto for the contemporary morass we live in. The Deltas intellectual malaise that is now the modern idocracy. The cultist anathema of the solidarity circle, now the evangelical right wing and the indignant Trump supporter.  Somas sleepwalkers….well, name your poison.

Dark days indeed.

The book had enough of a seminal impact on me to title one of my pieces after it, back in 2014 for my series Purgatorium. I’ll be making an announcement about its follow up series in the new year.

Fake News Schism

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

6.5″ x 8″-Mixed Media on Ingres paper

Its just a sketch tossed off in a couple of hours, the culmination of feeling like one’s head has been encased in concrete for six months.

Except to say, it encapsulates entirely the tumult of these politically divisive times, where falsehoods are legitimized as alternative facts, where lies are filtered through a monocle of partisan bias, where reality has no cachet because everything does.