Penultimate Peril

“Richard Nixon Back Again”

Billy Joel, We Didn’t Start the Fire.

The working title for this one might end up being “The Artifice of Fraud”,”Cognitive Dissidence”, “Origins of a Black Hole” or something entirely different. Given these time’s it was created in, there shouldn’t be much of a symbolic leap over what, or rather “whom” it’s about.

That it’s the penultimate piece to a series about ill omens and man’s predisposition toward self annihilation, may have fresh and foreboding significance, given the US and the former Soviet Unions recent withdrawal from the nuclear arms treaty.

If we survive the years ahead, at the very least the best historical legacy we could look forward to, may be the flourishing of art that reflects the period we live in.

For instance, the atrocities of Spain's bloody war produced Goya's Distasters of War,  the horrors of Otto Dix's nightmarish hellscapes, sprung from the decay of first WW trenches, Philip Guston's eviscerating scrawls showcased the Nixon years, and Peter Howson's sprawling canvases rose from the stark degradation and inhumanity of Bosnia's war.

If there is one thing safe to assume, it’s that we live in fertile times for works of such scope.

Having just viewed Velvet Buzzsaw on Netflix, I'm heartened by the fact that for all the droll and ugly depiction of artifice and hollow pretension in the Contemporary Art World, at least Hollywood seems in on the secret that Dark figurative painting, is the most authentic art of substance.

Albeit if the artist was mad, unknown and dead.

Still...

One more to go before showtime, long nights of back breaking daubing and blind panic before showtime. 


While you wait to see the new stuff, here's some old stuff-a blast from the past when I was unknown, mad at the world and may as well have been dead. Encompassing the decade 1987 to 1997, for what were my wilderness years, I've uploaded a gallery of curio's for those who might be curious . 

The Liar | Mixed media on canvas panel | 11" x 18" (1997)

Whilst I wish I could include the long since lost Dalinian neurotic etchings of '84, or the following summer painting Eric Fischl style nudes,  what remains are I think, my first embryonic stumbling's through the same spiritual dark matter that has consumed my work for my entire artistic life. 


Click the link below to see more:


1987-1997

Half a century away

If I’m honest. I never thought I’d make it to my half century. I imagined the long shadow cast by the reaper over much of my life, would have caught up with me by now.

Twenty years ago, I might have invited it to.

Ah, the nihilism and self-destruction of callow youth eh?

Still, I made it regardless, far happier, blessed and fortunate than any other dauber from the back jiggers of Liverpool might have reason to hope for.

Hindsight has also provided me the knowledge that as much as times change, some things remain the same.  For myself, it’s been that unrelenting need to make art.

Which is why I thought it might be quite nice to put together a little video retrospective of work from the  70’s to present day. Also notable I suppose, is that for the very first time (and possibly the last) it includes a little musical accompaniment composed and performed by myself throughout.

Looking back over the body of my work these last few weeks, it’s been interesting to note that regardless of any evolution in style or technique, there’s been a common thread through my work that has remained constant: those same niggling questions of mortality, and it could be a coping mechanism for the ‘comprehensible darkness’ as Jung called it, or simply because I am ‘still a kid at heart’ as my wife-Lani says, but I can’t deny the almost neurotic obsession that has been there from childhood scrawl to sprawling canvas.

I imagine it will be that way until the darkness swallows me.