Title Series

It's a month away until showtime.

Even the icy tundra of the early morning studio, can't deter me from the last haul, as I defrost, warming my hands by the space heater, and with bottomless mugs of tea . 

As the final piece nestles on the easel, the juggling frenzy of photographing the pieces and varnishing them before framing extends the working day, long into the evening. 

It's afforded me the distance of looking over the entire collection, without that constant niggling feeling that I want to tickle a corner or start over. 

I can tell you that the material comprises what I believe to be some of my most powerful, unsettling and uncompromising work to date. Truly, serpentine anima for the dark period it's been created in.

I'm very happy and proud of the whole series.

Whilst I can't reveal the works yet, the titles at least should give you some semblance of what to expect. As the Tempest was to Purgatorium, some of the titles for Paradiso's Fall are taken from passages of Milton's Paradise Lost. Others were directed from specific content. Here then-in the order I hope to exhibit them-are the titles.

1 What's Dark Within, Illuminate.

2 Where Death and Nature Breeds

3 The Voyage of Elen

4 The Death Eaters

5 The Origins of Life

6 The Origins of Death

7 Origins of a Black Hole

8 Ages of Hopeless End

9 For Want of Other Prey

Other possible titles were 'To Put it Mildly', 'Long and Prayerful Consideration' 'Chaos Judge the Strife' and 'Sacrament of the White Knights', so make of those what you will.
 

Also uncompromising, was Tomi Ungerer, who I read with real sadness, passed away recently. As I wrote in a previous post from 2009, upon first seeing Tomi's work in his book-Testament-at Liverpool's library in the 1980's had a profound effect on me. "his work peels back the thinly veiled skin to reveal the stark bone of societies distemper beneath."

And whilst some would say that 87 years of age is a good innings, it seems pretty unfair that he's gone, given a certain former 'reality' TV host still breathes to spread misery and woe, but then I guess as with Newtons third law, 'everything has an equal and opposite reaction'

I highly recommend 'Far out isn't far enough' if you haven't seen it-I think it was on Netflix, but beg, borrow or steal a copy.

Object D' Art-Tomi Ungerer-Agent Provocateur

'My anger is essential to my work,-Humour is a defense mechanism against the evils of society.'
Tomi Ungerer




I first became aquainted with Tomi Ungerers work, upon discovering his dark little tome-Testament-in an even darker corner of a Liverpool library in the very early 1980's.
The naive, fluid economy of brittle line drawings, belied the psychological and political depth of his renderings-from the protest posters of the 60s, to the flabby skinned,pearls and fur draped caricatures of high society,stiffing one another with a leer, or the Belsen style corpses humping sadomasochistic machines (when not fleecing swine tied to kitchen furniture,that is), the stark expressionistic monochrome of his sardonic humor, cut through the dung like the knife carving blood trails on the jacket.

A popular children's illustrator and broadsheet cartoonist in the US during the fifties and sixties-Ungerer-seeing too many parallels between the Nazi occupied township of his childhood, and the war in Vietnam, became incensed and returned to his native Europe in 1971, growing more subversive in the approach to his craft.

Recast as 'agent provocateur' no stone of modern malady was left unturned and tossed in vitriol, be it a world choked by greed, overpopulation and industrialization, the sacrificial bloodletting and bomb stockpiles of the warmongers, or the alienation of sexual perversion-now more than ever-his work peels back the thinly veiled skin to reveal the stark bone of societies distemper beneath.