Mood swings.

“All art is exorcism”

Otto Dix

Maybe it’s the algorithmic nature of using the word-“mood”-but the last time I posted one of these, my inbox was cluster bombed with spam from Russia, hawking potency inducing pharmaceuticals.

I don’t know that much of the art pinned to my little cork board hails from the Slav republic, but it does raise my spirits as well as my aspirations daily, and is a sort of aural exemplar for me to draw on, going into the new series.

From Left to right then:

“Newborn baby on hands”-Otto Dix
Liverpool tenements 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“The Suicide of Judas”-John Canavesio
“Parable of the blind”-Pieter Bruegel
“Two Witches”-Hans Balding
“The Lamp of the Devil”-Francisco Goya
“House of Succubus”-Nona Limmen
“Uneven Couple”-Otto Dix
Liverpool playground 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“The Nightmare”-Pasquale Liotta Cristaldi
“Man of Sorrows Christ”-Hans Memling
“Sacrifice of Isaac”-Carravagio
“Abandoned Playground”-Erhan Yilmaz
“Seven Deadly Sins”-Otto Dix
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Fight with Cudgels”-Francisco Goya
“Three Women”-Otto Dix
“Trench Warfare”-Otto Dix
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Iron rods in a field”-sketch 1989- David Van Gough
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Woman pissing”-Picasso

Mood Board

 'And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?"

Jerusalem-William Blake


That's quite a mosaic of madness there, comprising a tapestry of transcendent terror, from the deathly pall of a blossoming mushroom cloud through Rubens beefy original sin, by way of Jattault's lord of the flies, to the gnarled toes of Grunewald's Corpus Christi and the feeding trough in Jonestown. It's all there, a visual totem that could redouble as a mood board for the nations psyche, but actually depicts all my artistic preoccupations for a year that has been creatively fulfilling and parochially foreboding.  

Welcome relief then, as I prepare myself to return to Old Blighty for the holidays.

Of the many gifts my life has been blessed with this year, the greatest of them all will be meeting my beautiful grandson -Atticus for the first time. Because any legacy I could hope to leave, shrinks in the great shadow of that one. 

As it should.

Which just leaves me with the wish that your Solstice be filled to the brim with love and libation, and the hope that along with prosperity and health, the coming year brings lucidity and accord.