1. The eve of the witching hour,in which the front yard is suitably cobweb and corpse bedecked, sticky candy brims in a bucket head for the trick or treaters, and we are eagerly putting finishing touches to our costumes. Its a Batman themed event, so this year, Lani and I are going as Dark Knight foils-Poison Ivy and the Riddler. 2. Perhaps it was the weather or the fact that we were on the bones of our arse poor, but as a child, my families Halloween celebration extended to just ducking for apples and carving turnips-pumpkins being too much of a rarity or luxury item in 1970's England. Nevertheless, it was my favorite time of year, and my staple diet would have been the Pan book of Horror stories my Uncle Tony passed down to me, the Hammer double bills on a Friday night, and horror comic anthologies like The House of Mystery, House of Secrets and Weird Mystery. 3. As is customary, we held our own little Horror double bill last night, with the remarkable Swedish Vampire movie,Let the Right One in-which I'll review at another time-and the Hammer Horror classic the Vampire Lovers, starring Ingrid Pitt as the resurrected countess Camilla with more than a healthy appetite for buxom, young, virgin flesh. Vampire lesbians...whats not to love? It also starred the quite lovely doe eyed Madeline Smith, who I was most smitten with in my younger days-I wonder why? 4. If there was a concession to Halloween American style when I was young, it was Charlie Browns great pumpkin patch, which is obligatory, wherever you are-Happy Halloween Everyone!!:
Progress may seem imperceptible, and even if I'm indulging neurosis, by the end, I may actually have something as crystaline as the bullet of that first vision.
It would make a great title, but I've plumped for the less imaginative 'Two Dead Roses' I like the dichotomy (my favourite word) in the fact that its a still life depicting death.
Meanwhile, its back to the cohesiveness of my series-The Valley feels about a day from completion, but its always such a eureka moment when I down my brushes and draw a line under 'The End', so it may drag a day beyond that. We'll see.
It's odd how artistically legitimate painting a still life feels. How liberating it is-freeing the artist from the flourishes and intensity of concept, falling instead on the prop of form, light and hue to carry it.
Carried along with the passage of extinguishing time, watching two dying roses wilt under the studio lights was a welcome distraction from the negative energies of this past month for me, and very grounding as an exercise.
Which reminds me...It would be all too easy to dismiss Brett Anderson as just another bad Bowie wannabe, or worse-Gary Numan-except the song 'Still Life' from 93's Suede album, DogManStar, is at least worthy of anything in the dukes cannon:
If my series of mermaid paintings were a love sonnet to my wife, then the works that followed seemed a natural progression.
Bolstered by the brio of sales, and taking more than a leaf from the book of world domination-courtesy of my good friend Jasmine Becket Griffith, I repackaged my Urban Fairies as awkward, blitzed out-on-absinthe, little fae punkettes, too archaic for the modern world-prostituting themselves and their magiks to a society that had outgrown them. Conceptually it was born from the brow of an X box-artistically, it was all very telling.
As in the piece-'Faeries do it better'-art had been relegated to the footnote of an alleyway wall. The license deals followed*, and for a short time my thumb-tacked addition onto every angst ridden, emo's bedroom wall was assured, and words like integrity became replaced by words such as demographic. Reinventing myself as a modern day Arthur Rackham with the Froud crowd, It became akin to pulling the wings from faeries, or at least-forging brass ones for my own back. By the end of the whole wretched three years, I had been horribly shafted several times over by less reputable licensing companies, any reputation I had artistically was in tatters, and I had nothing but contempt for everything I had done.
Destiny-waiting for the wind to change- was exactly that, in the eternal waiting room of big breaks, I was starving for my turn. I still am.
I retired the series in 05, with the aptly titled work-'Done'
Disillusioned, I retreated to the avant garde and the influences of my early years, to reconsider my next career move. *To date-despite residual licenses,and those still making money from my work, I have received barely a cent, so should you find anything in stores with my name on that is not endorsed by myself-ie: figurines, journals, unsigned prints, T-shirts, cards, mugs, candles-etc... please do not buy it, I do not get royalty for any of it.
'The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.' J. G. Ballard
The effect of marbling the walls took real tenacity-several hours on my knees, almost nose to canvas. The last stroke will feel like falling upon an oasis after weeks lost in the desert. Not too far now.
