“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
Began the next Ghost piece. It has a macabre resonance which prompted my wife to make comparisons with the tree from Spooky Hollow, although the only hollow that was inside me when I painted it,was the realisation that its not 1979 anymore.
There's something oddly definitive about that particular year which has always left an indelible mark on me. I guess I would have been twelve, so it was pre teen, but the sound of the times through the music, the movies, my burgeoning hunger for understanding over what life was about was just beginning, and of course it was the end of the 70's.
The final year of innocence then?
In the 90's , I chose to set Post Mortimer in that year, and It was enough for Billy Corgan to write a song about it, so I really must do a post about it one day.
Took a breather, to catch Alan Bennett's satire,The Madness of King George III at the San Diego Old Globe theatre last night.
It's a wonderful piece of work of course, depicting a caricature court of buffoons,fops,sycophants and treachery that showed amusing parallels with contemporary circles of power, but what an extraordinary performance by the lead actor-Miles Anderson.
Disquieting, manic, vitriolic,poignant-I can't recommend the play highly enough.
I've a day of catching up on shipping orders. Still, I'm deeply relieved by the fact that it shall be completely undistracted- after over a month, the house is empty again.
Appropriately, here is Japans sublime 'Quiet Life' from the turn of the 80's.
Sunday night and letting the sublime sedation of a grand days work flow over me.
Without getting too psycho wankery about it, I am never more transformed than when I'm painting well.
David Sylvian is on his third rotation, there's a cool air moving through the studio, I've got nothing clanking around in my periphery and my mind is lilting on a hammock between two palms on a beach in the pacific somewhere.
The dark just flows out of me, like its trickling down my fingertips and through my sable.
The latest piece has felt like a revelation for me-it's almost a sister piece to the merging skull compositions I've been working on-Trinity, Life After Death and Disambiguous foresight with the exception that it feels like I made some sort of evolution in my painting.
Apart from when I've included the skulls in a figurative environment, the background element has always felt detached, like an object oscillating in a none space-its relationship has only been measured by color or what I would call a theatrical backdrop to instill an ominous grandeur that isn't there.
With this piece, I feel I've bridged that gap-making it seem like the space around the skull has fossilized and somehow biomorphically suffused with bone. Hard space if you will.
I was also trying to introduce a spiritual element as a counterpoint to the cold hollow skull motif, working on the notion that the cavities and shadows harbor echoes of thoughts past, almost in the same way phantasms haunt an old room following some emotionally traumatic event.
As a result, I've entitled it 'Ghost', I'm delighted with the result, and shall develop the piece to larger scale as a part of this particular group.
Here's that wonderful abstract piece of avant garde also called 'Ghosts' by David Sylvian from the early 80's. Hard to believe that anything so odd could ever be in the charts, but it was a different and better time then.
