Illusion Magazine article

“His paintings are complex, for where there is kitsch and playfulness, there is also discomfort and violence, together gesturing towards an inevitable end for the bodies and cultural eras they depict.”

Hayley Evans-Illusion Magazine

Whilst I am sequestered on commission duties, here is a superbly eloquent article about yours truly. Thank you Hayley and Illusion mag. The title alone “Rot and Transformation” could be a career manifesto:

Read Here

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.

The Tower

Oil on canvas-20″ x 24″, $1,500

And now for something completely different.
Commissioned as part of an Astral themed 78 Tarot project, this one was something of a fun diversion, combining  all the sci-fi elements that would have utterly enamored my ten-year-old self. It’s something of an homage I suppose to all those 2000ad Future shock covers I would pour over for hours, in the hopes of one day becoming one of their retinue of Art droids.
That never happened of course,  and I’m much happier digging the dark furrow I currently do, but as 2000ad turns 40 and I hit my half century next month, it’s worth acknowledging the influences that informed me.

Original Painting

I’ve knocked together a cover of how it might have looked for shits and giggles. One can imagine a Tharg future shock that might accompany it. Something perhaps about ET’s sending space monkeys back in time to populate humanity.

Below is the obligatory bumf to go with the Tarot booklet

“Humanities aspiration has been one that has forever fixed it’seyes heavenward. If the stars were ciphers to map our destiny, then the looming edifices throughout history seem constructed as a means to reach them. Perhaps it is man’s desire to be closer to the source, Godlike in his eternal spiritual quest to elevate himself from mere mortality. And yet, like the fall of empires past that litter history, man’s arrogance and indignance seem’s always beset by self-destruction and the primal need to reconstruct the natural order.

And so Gods of old are supplanted by interstellar Gods, the desire to fill the void of fallen doctrines (as in the dead hollow tree) with the hope that we are not alone in the universe, that something larger than ourselves stands forever on the periphery, pulling strings. And yet our limited knowledge and ineptitude leave us stumbling around like simians in space, our search for enlightenment, stunted by fear of the unknown, ever ready to crack the skull of a different race with a nearby stone, because our need to feel superior in the microcosm will always usurp any progress, and lesson that could be learned. And as with the ouroboros, we are lost in the cosmic cycle of death, symbolized by the crystal skull.

The Tower then, is a parable of facade, an ephemeral artifact manufactured by the conceit of ego, built on the sands of eternal folly, that could come crashing down in an instant of catastrophic epiphany.”

Conjoined 7

So on the day millions of women from around the world took to the streets against the new dark ages and muddy California Skys cascaded a tumult in accord, a little corner of Bergamont station was marking these times of dark herald, with Chet Zars Conjoined 7.

I could tell you of phantoms and hellions from every corner of the underworld, of mystical dervish shadows from  Hades bubbling craters, but it would be better if you saw it for yourself. After all, Darkness should be the visual anecdote of storytellers, not the reality manifested in halls of power.

Thank you to Gary and Chet, my fellow artists and everyone who braved traffic and downpour , the show is on display through February 11th.

The blind patriot will eat himself

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
― George Orwell, 1984

9″x 14″-ink on paper

I say this with full knowledge that I could pull a fistful from a grab bag of ominous portent since Inauguration day, but one of the most distressing things in the wake of Trumpocalypse is the continued willingness of his supporters to be completely blinkered by their cultish loyalty. Even in the face, it seems, in what are glaring, verifiable truths.

I’ve seen this on the other side also-and I get it, there’s comfort to be had in the consensus of delusion that no matter how much your party lies, it will never tell porkies as big as the opposition.

Except to say that within the space of a few days when both his strategist and press secretary have owned up to deploying a mind-boggling multiverse of ‘alternative truths’, even when challenged on the veracity of crowd size and voting fraud,  one need not pole jump to reach for the dark specter of Orwellian doublethink or 2+2=5.

Indeed, I read today that the book that was meant to be a parable of dystopian fiction, is currently a best seller. Old George would be stoked were it not the reason for the season.

I mean fuck me, dip into any page and you could pull out a passage that could be a manifesto to the times we live in. I found at least a dozen in the first few minutes of prefacing this page.

Which is why I knocked together this little drawing ‘The blind patriot will eat himself’, portraying as it does the self-cannibalism and mental gymnastics that the nationalist will go to in service of the body national.

My continued plunder through old Adam Curtis documentaries particularly feels like watching a play by play.

To which end, I recommend his series “The Living Dead” on Youtube. Watch it before the web goes dark.

I wish I felt like I was kidding.

We live in scary times indeed.

Leviathan

Oil on canvas-42″ x 80″

“And because the constitution of a mans Body, is in continuall mutation; it is impossible that all the same things should alwayes cause in him the same Appetites, and aversions; much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object.
Good Evill”

Thomas Hobbes-Leviathan

Or the great metaphysical war between Hitler and Van Gogh, two historical figures parallel in the singularity of their ambitions, both failed artists within their lifetime,  yet so divided in that failures resolution.  Be it Ego or Id, creator or destructor, the paradox of dualism is manifest.

I realise I’m putting Descartes before the horse here.

I suppose they represent Post-contemporary paragons of the underdog, framing the entire 20th century and beyond. certainly when thinking of Van Gogh as the Godfather of Modern Art, there is the notion that there is some nobility in failure, when the truth so often comes at a cost whether the destruction that manifests is internal or as in Hitler’s case external.  I have to say, a lot of my thinking was informed by reading Artaud’s “Van Gogh: The man suicided by society” Particularly the haunting lines:

“Nobody ever wrote or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, invented, for another reason than to exit from hell. Each paint brush touch/strike (coup de pinceau) on the canvas is worst than an event.”

And yet Adolf had the presence of twisted mind to obliterated that “self-event” by creating Hell on Earth.

Lennon (the fuhrer’s antithesis) said it best when he confessed: “part of me suspects I am a loser, the other part God almighty.”

As I said previously here, it’s taken the best part of five years to bring it to some realisation but given that I completed it a week before the inauguration, the theme is eerily resonant-conjoined twins of diametrically opposed worldview, battling as Babylon falls like a sandcastle, whilst the architect King Nimrod (also an allusion to that other Nimrod totem of destruction) self-combusts in his zealous appetite to reorder the universe.

Having just watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation and read a recent interview where he perhaps wrongly charges the art world with some of the responsibility for the post-truth, Brexit / Trump outcome, it behooves me to wonder how we as artists can best characterize what we do, given the events and influences that inform us.

The painting will be on show alongside other artists works for Chet Zars Conjoined 7 show at Copro Gallery from January 21st.

Conjoined 7 at Copro

In which a selection of dark, underworld beasts, demonic progeny, and feral fiends shall assemble before a hypnotized throng. No I’m not talking about the inauguration, but Chet Zar’s annual Conjoined show at Copro gallery in L.A of which I shall be honorably participating.

The show opens on the 21’st January, and since at the time of writing, I am still putting the final touches to my largest piece to date, I better get my skates on.

Copronasan Gallery

Bergamot Arts Complex,
2525 Michigan Ave T5,
Santa Monica, CA 90404