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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Tales from the dead zone

It’s been several months since I last wrote, I know, but if posts have been thin on the ground of late, it’s because I’ve been pouring myself into the work at hand.

That, plus its all too easy to feel like you are just adding to the noise right now, magnifying the human footprint marked ‘the landfill of opinion’. Better to stay in the dead zone.

Still, it’s alarmingly distressing out there-kiddies in cages. Concentration camps. An entire demographic of the populous falling over themselves with lick spittle piety to justify it. One wonders where the balance will tip, and how far over the edge.

The work by contrast has flourished, but is no less inspired by current events. It would be hard not to. What began contextually as possibly my farewell letter to the American empire, has become a surreal catalogue of the ill omens that have informed it.

This piece-as yet untitled-swirls with apocalyptic nods and winks. Personal and otherwise. Broadly, there are the American Killing fields of Vietnam. The little napalm girl-Kim Phuc in that eerie messianic pose. Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively.

Quite a lot of unsavory raw meat to swallow, and not the kind of sandwich one feels compelled to share.

"Bosch Brain Freeze" - Oil on canvas-11" x 14"

It’s not all been dark introspection, took a breather and knocked out a fun little Bosch homage for La Bodega’s recent Spirit Animal show.

Because the old Flemish master is always a good party trick to conjure at the end times.

Anyway, more announcements to follow soon, all being well.

Riding a dark horse.

Back in the saddle on this one then.  Pushing my charge to the finish line while I manifest the next series.  If memory serves, I began this one at a live painting event at the Ruby Room in San Diego, on what was purportedly a Mayan predictor to the end times-12/21/12. Of course, it turned out to be the usual load of apocalyptic bollocks, but given the current state of world events, one wonders whether the countdown to midnight was merely set in motion on that date.

Each day feels like a dark revelation in new levels of madness now, a hangman’s breakfast for a world ever on the precipice of some fresh horror, all delivered by a bloviating buffoon tweeting diatribes of inanity and petty gripes, like an indignant, salivating ape lobbing feces.  And whilst my beloved England comes to grips with another night of deadly attacks by radicalized zealots, the true modern day terrorism it seems is on the collective psyche.

For one of the envisioned pieces, I’ve been researching Jonestown and Heavens Gate, and though I’ve grazed the draw of cultism before of course with the Man/son series,  it’s been unnerving not to draw parallels with the ease by which the masses can be so easily subjugated here.  As if the contemporary pied pipers are political and pastoral pontificates, enchanting with arias of disenchantment, hypnotizing the dogmatically obstinate. In these dark days, it’s hard not to feel like all is lost, like the experimental petri dish marked mankind has mutated into some monstrous pathogen.

Which reminds me, I watched my friend Chet Zar’s wonderful documentary “I like to paint monsters” the other day, and he said something in it which really struck a chord, and to paraphrase, it was that dark art makes sense of a dark world that doesn’t. It’s a moving and hugely inspiring film if you haven’t seen it (please do), but it reminded me that the artists role is more important than ever, and that I’ll keep doing my part to fathom the unraveling shitstorm, in the event that we make it for future generations to disseminate.