Currently on my easel, is a commissioned work that will eventually be part of a Tarot deck, comprising 78 artists from around the globe.
It's their second such deck-this time with a nautical theme, and for whatever reason, they thought I'd be a good fit for El Diablo himself, so armed and mustered and stoked with fire, brimstone,shock and awe, here for your viewing pleasure is a sneak peak of me in Satan's service.
I look like I have a tail in this picture.
For your eyes only, a little tease banner-pocket size puddles of eleven-a small thread of a big heavy rug. As the proud Dad of this rabble spawn, it's quite something to stand on the periphery of it all-a universe of hope, anticipation and possibility to survey before birth date, before the big hand hits twelve.
It's a vantage point that renders the effrontery of the mundane as mere pettyfog, the hours of knee grazing and tongue gnawing as measured wing waiting.
Art is all about timekeeping, after all.
Here I am like Virgil in Hades, walking on tinder's whilst feeling the heat ,still a mad dog and an Englishman staying out of the midday sun whilst pushing to forge my day in it.
You can't see, but in between the heat and the madness, I run old films on my computer such as the Agony and the Ecstasy-Chuck Heston acting through his teeth, whilst chewing the Sistine Chapel with his cold dead hand, Rex Harrison as 'Enry 'Iggins playing the Pontiff.
It's quite epic and splendid actually, the melodrama not diminishing the awesome crippling scale and magnitude of Michelangelo's 5,000 square foot fresco one iota.
Even through the paint spattered glow of my 16" monitor, my jaw slackens at that accomplishment, whilst my little twelve piece vignette of internal first world turmoil dwarves like an anonymous pallbearer in the 16th century.
Or even this one for that matter.
Sometimes reaching a ceiling is just a reminder of how dense the shadows are cast beneath it.
One more pass-I keep telling myself-and this one will be done. I down my brushes and toss palettes, then spend the rest of the evening pacing in and out of the studio to pick holes in it, fighting the urge to paint over it, or at least crack the bastard over my knee.
Who was it said a painting is never finished, merely abandoned?
Its a kind of neurosis, I'd moot Van Gogh maddening except I'd be so lucky to be ailed by the kind of madness that has one knocking out five paintings before breakfast.
In a nightmarish purgatory somewhere, I work the same painting for a lifetime, the canvas caked ten foot thick with layers.
Quite aptly it'll be titled 'Misery acquaints man with strange bedfellows' when its done.
This particular bedfellow gives me no rest.
The feast before Samhain is with us once again, the Danse Macabre for the fabled Aos Sí. Not for me some anecdote on a haunted gallery theme night. Anything relative to 'darker' art's is relegated as tacky as year old candy in a rotten Jack o Lantern this time of year at any rate. Much to my cost and chagrin.
Still, the spirits run freely through the studio, dark corners move and spells are cast with the wave of a sable.
And I revert to my natural state.
Happy All Hallows.
That's the new piece propped on my easel, and it strikes me that sometimes, the work I do- for all its predisposition-eerily resounds the now.
That sucking sound you hear is the canvas so dense with dark matter, it's like a black hole reflected in an ebon mirror.
It's the parable of Dante: a veritable
inferno beyond the soaring temperatures and the demons of my studio, beyond the faux outrage over a Disney Monarch shaking her skinny arse on national
tv, and a fallen crop of bloodless children littering the streets to the strains of a news anchors soundbyte. There's another ensuing war brewing like a witches cauldron in the middle east, a reactor in the orient spewing radiation like acid in a well, hubble-bubble, toil and trouble casting the shadow of an apocalyptic endpoint that both feeds the nihilists black imaginings and dismembers the optimists servant. To be an artist sometimes means being possessed with the rage of the aggrieved and the despondency of the paralyzed.
In other word's it's enough fuel to stoke the fire and extinguish it, if only because as little air that moves through the studio right now, there is no living in a vacuum at such times.
I realize its adding little to the burgeoning mire of Instagram style selfies- another not particular flattering shot of the artist in situ (et al)-but it's that time of year again, paint smeared, war torn and in the flesh as it were, a proverbial art warrior, somewhere between battling the heatwave and burning the midnight oil on canvas.
I make it sound more romantic than it is certainly.
Still you can sort of make out what I've been working on in the background-the ongoing Purgatorium duties-a sneak peak whilst you wait.
