Flogging a dead horse

It’s winter on the mountain, so colder than a witches tit , as my fingers numb painting progeny from some region of Hades. I’m tempted to liken it all to Munch in his open-air studio, or Brueghel freezing his arse off painting Hunters in the snow, except the make shift home studio / garage seems less romantic, and for all its crappiness-the little space heater disqualifies me from truly suffering for my art.

Still, it’s brass monkeys.

This one actually started out as something I knocked up at a live painting thing at some bar several years back. It’s sat abandoned behind a bunch of other unfinished canvases ever since. And then November happened, so no better time to dust off one of the four horsemen in the face of impending apocalypse I suppose.

I’m juggling two other large-scale pieces right now, which means all this renewed fever of activity will keep me warm before actual hell or a nuclear winter is unleashed on earth.

All the Devils are here.

36″ x 48″

Oil on canvas

Painted this, one-month last year.

Here’s the obligatory wank I wrote at the time:

“If the inherent meanings attributed with the up-right turn of the Devil tarot, are those of bondage, addiction, materialism, sexuality then how do these external forces translate in a contemporary sense?

With this piece, I wanted to take a traditional, almost secular avatar and revise it to a set of recognizable boundary’s in a culturally and politically relevant sense.

So I used the moment a first term president, stood on the literal flagship,representing an iconographic and establishment figure head-U.S.S Lincoln-to pronounce “Mission Accomplished”
What was accomplished exactly?
Was it a pronouncement to something far more sinister, made as it was on May 1st- or May day- a sacred Beltane date in the Illuminati calendar and also coincidentally, the same date of the Gulf oil spill , the death of Bin Laden, and a decade to the day that I completed this painting.

History has catalogued the subsequent fallout and the measure of swaggering, corporate, militarized, imperial arrogance of that speech far more adroitly than I ever can in paint, but in regards to the framework of the Tarot and its meaning, how do we navigate these murky waters to understand our own complicity to inevitable destruction, and the Cthulu-like tendrils that tumult and take root beneath the surface?

We do so because we are beholden to established power structures, to our acquisitions, our narcissism, to the illusionary deception of fear through the media, the physical bondage of materialism, to superficial totems, to our endless distractions, our disconnection of each other through a wifi connection, our addiction to fossil fuels for the plundering of our Online Articles.

Who are the real Devils then?  Are we the Luciferian aspect-the idolators that impose a hell of our own making upon Earth? And do we have it within our power to break the bonds of enslavement?
Or do we leave  the chance to the turn of a card?”

It’s never seemed more prevalent.

It’s also going to be on display at Gregorio Escalante’s gallery for Chet Zar’s Dark Realism / Dark Surrealism show from December 3rd.

I’ll post more details soon.

Hell is truth seen too late.

What a week ,eh?  A week in which it seems the world has gone utterly barking mad. In the proliferation of editorials and post-mortems it’s hard not to cast this period as America’s final obituary. Hard not to fear the cataclysms and horrors the future holds. Hard not to see the dark specters in the hard lessons of history. Hard not to feel like Nietzsche’s crazed ragman, raging at the sky.

All too easy in fact, in a blighted year that has already been so fucking wretched.

As an artist particularly, its all too easy to retreat to escapism and impartiality, after all-I’ve heard it said that “being divisive, is bad for business old boy”.

Except I see nothing but complicity in silence.

Art-NOW more than ever- has a responsibility to turn a mirror on the unraveling shit storm that will prevail over the coming years. And it may be the only democratizer and means of expression left to those who may fear retaliation for speaking out.

And I will do my bit, as I always have to put my brush where uncomfortable truths lie.

To that end, there is my new series, a direct follow on from Purgatorium, called Paradiso-Edens Fall,a title that may give something of an insight into my dark intent.

Then there is the bridge piece between the two, “Leviathan”-(pictured above) which takes its title from Thomas Hobbes book of the same name.

I shall also be making an announcement about a piece which shall be showing at Gregorio Escalante’s wonderful basement gallery shortly.

To quote Hobbes-“Hell is truth seen too late.” , and for me there is no more critical time but now to tell it.

Cagliastro’s Feast:

Bad table manners at Djinner time

11″ x 14″ | Oil on canvas

For the uninitiated, Alessandro Cagliastro (also known as Joseph Balsamo) was a self styled occultist from the 1800’s who developed the disreputable distinction of being a charlatan or as Thomas Carlyle put it- ‘the Prince of Quacks’. His reputation wasn’t helped by his legacy as a forger par excellence, or by his connection to the Marie Antoinette Diamond Necklace affair. There’s something of case for him being a forebearer of Crowley’s however, a kind of 0.1 version and in fact, the great beast himself claimed Cagliastro to be one of his early manifestations.

He is also the author of the esoteric manuscript, The Most Holy Trinosophia, and was the founder of the lodge for the rite of Egyptian Freemasonry, which would prove to be curtains for the old magus when the inquisition put him on a charge of being one of its paternal members.

Here, I have him seated at an altar for the knights of Malta,surrounded by his props and uncorking a djinn- no doubt spinning tales of treasures in the distant Mount Pellegrino, to the duped cracked skull of Marano. Yet there’s an overshadowing menace bearing down on the com media dell’arte. Something which is always peering from beneath the surface, a primal fear of dark foreboding and ancient rite as represented by the seven headed dragon of Babylon.

It’s the notion of something ancient being played out over time, a return to the themes I touched on in the Man/son series, and it’s given me something of a flavor of what my next body of work will look like.

Cagliastro’s Feast will be on show during the Dark Matters show,at Bash Fine Art from this coming weekend through the 26th November.

What doesn’t kill you

0″ x 12″-Oil on panel

Given that this is my umpteenth work this year to feature some sort of death motif, ought to give you an indication of how I’m feeling about everything.

This one particularly is about the relentless (bastard) disease of cancer which I’ve tackled twice in my work before- the first time in ‘Mothers Milk’ and secondly as a homage to a friend in ‘Legacy-an artist general truth’

This one may seem a lot less po-faced, even pop surreal I suppose, but no less vitriolic, particularly when I recall the two family members, the friend, and the idol lost in its ruthless wake this past year.

The Big ‘C’ is like a plague one dare not say fully, for fear of  invoking a death sentence, it’s there a lurking, malevolent, silent, conspiracy of the bodies betrayal, a festering paranoia in every breath you inhale.

I wanted to evoke some of that in this piece which will be part of a special group show called simply ‘Cancer’ at Hyaena Gallery from October 1st through October 30th.

The Eternal Battle progress 1

What to say about my latest outing? I could tell you that this one has been five years in the making.The huge canvas is at least that old, and the piece itself was meant to be the focal piece of the Purgatorium series, except time put paid to that. I never thought I’d gotten the idea right you see, so it was reworked as a dozen sketches over the years, before being shelved until very recently.
That was when I realized it should have been vertical instead of horizontal all along.
If nothing else, this tumultuous year has offered perspective.

The Eternal Battle is just a working title for now, but that’s Hitler and Van Gogh scrapping it out by the way, which is part of an ongoing theory I have about creative destruction and artistic failure in the 20th century. That would make a great title of a modern thesis actually-perhaps Mathew Collings should option it.  Perhaps not.

Lots of shows between now and the year end, but I’ll keep battling away on it and posting progressions in the interim.

Fridom Kahlo-Infinito

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

Frida Kahlo

11″ x 14″ | Oil on panel

Working in the Chicano quarter as I do, its hard not to feel the incandescence cast by Frida’s influence. Her striking visage is ubiquitous, even staring out nobly from a mural to the entrance of La Bodega gallery.

My piece for the forthcoming Tribute group show has our Art heroine reborn as the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, whose resume boasts of being the Aztec god of wind, Venus, the dawn and Arts and Crafts.

In such days when the world seems intent on bloodshed and cavernous divide, a celebration of Frida’s legacy remains one which is thankfully universal to all.

Show opens July 9th | 4pm-10pm. Free admission and open to all ages. Children’s and adult look-alike contest. Art, food, music, merchandise, culture!