Fallout

“How can I save my little boy
From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence” 

Russians- Sting

It’s that time of year again, the feast of samhain, the witching hour resurrection of spirits and classic horror video nasties on DVD.

I’m reminded of the time back in the early 80’s, when a psychological horror of a different kind consumed the metaphysical airwaves.

Back then, between ads for chocolate digestives and Danger Mouse, you could look forward to public information broadcasts informing you what to do in the event of a nuclear blast.

By the same guy who did voice overs for Barrett homes no less.




While the transmission of Threads in ’84, dismissed any hope that sanctuary could be sought in a cupboard under the stairs, it did instill the kind of paralyzing terror that would come to dwarf all the cheap thrills of late night Halloween horror.



I have youthful levity to thank for lessening the full gravity of days when bombing drills, meant my classmates and I  would have to hide under our desks.

But there was no escape, because it permeated culturally, everything steadfastly preparing us for annihilation, because even the our record collections echoed sirens songs for the end times. Everyone from Prince’s infectious carrion call to Party like its 1999 as a defiant final act of hedonism, through Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes which adopted the air raid siren from public information broadcast as it’s opening salvo.*

By the time warnings about the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl’s liquefying core, had settled over European pastures, nothing could mollify the terrible forebodings of the ultimate zero sum game.

There’s some of that sense of dread in this latest work I feel, reanimated in an era assailed by the toxic unraveling of a deranged mind,trigger finger poised over the final reset button, and venerated by a host of pious followers, rapture ravenous for the vindication that might be wrought from total annihilation.

As I said in a post back in 2017-we are living “the consequence of longing for a period when things were purportedly ‘great’.

Because along with the desire to relive all the illusory days of maga-nificence ,with it’s bargain basement but equally dementia addled Reagan, come all that era’s terrible distemper’s. The past is littered with as much gore as it is glory, and like the my favorite horror story-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein-reanimating the dead, can only ever bring with it the bitter stench of the grave.

*In writing this post, I was both nostalgic and a little alarmed recalling the chart fare I listened to of the period. The list could be compiled to make an End of the world party collection.

Prince-Party Like it’s 1999
OMD-Enola Gay
Alphaville-Forever Young
Ultravox-Dancing with tears in my eyes
Nena-99 Luftballons
Heaven 17-Lets all Make a Bomb
Billy Bragg-Between the Wars
Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes
Kate Bush-Breathing Sisters of Mercy-Dominion/Mother Russia
Morrissey-Everyday is like Sunday
Scorpions-Winds of Change
The Clash-London Calling
David Bowie-When the Wind Blows
Sting-Russians
Peter Gabriel-Games without Frontiers
Duran Duran-Planet Earth
Mike and the Mechanics-Silent Running
The Fixx-Stand or Fall
Men at Work-Overkill

For your listening/watching pleasure, I’ve compiled the full list on YouTube:

Stillborne

“Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.”

Medusa-Sylvia Plath

24′ x 36″
Oil on canvas

I’ve painted Medusa before, or at least her ghost, which was if memory serves, prompted by reading some Jack London.

This one-partially inspired by Plath’s gorgeous poem about her mother-also supposes what might have happened had the Gorgon queen avoided being dispatched by Perseus’s sword, and gone on to conceive Poseidon’s progeny.

Yes I know, she has a head of eels instead of snakes, but it felt rather more in keeping with Athena’s wrathful spite mocking the mariner God, as well as a nice chance to continue a symbolic trope I started with Origins of a Black Hole.

I’ll be showing the piece at Copro gallery, for Chet Zar’s first Dark Art Society Group Show this Saturday through October.

Mood swings.

“All art is exorcism”

Otto Dix

Maybe it’s the algorithmic nature of using the word-“mood”-but the last time I posted one of these, my inbox was cluster bombed with spam from Russia, hawking potency inducing pharmaceuticals.

I don’t know that much of the art pinned to my little cork board hails from the Slav republic, but it does raise my spirits as well as my aspirations daily, and is a sort of aural exemplar for me to draw on, going into the new series.

From Left to right then:

“Newborn baby on hands”-Otto Dix
Liverpool tenements 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“The Suicide of Judas”-John Canavesio
“Parable of the blind”-Pieter Bruegel
“Two Witches”-Hans Balding
“The Lamp of the Devil”-Francisco Goya
“House of Succubus”-Nona Limmen
“Uneven Couple”-Otto Dix
Liverpool playground 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“The Nightmare”-Pasquale Liotta Cristaldi
“Man of Sorrows Christ”-Hans Memling
“Sacrifice of Isaac”-Carravagio
“Abandoned Playground”-Erhan Yilmaz
“Seven Deadly Sins”-Otto Dix
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Fight with Cudgels”-Francisco Goya
“Three Women”-Otto Dix
“Trench Warfare”-Otto Dix
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Iron rods in a field”-sketch 1989- David Van Gough
Liverpool wasteland 1980s-Dave Sinclair
“Woman pissing”-Picasso

Snake eyes

I’m working on a little diversion here- a side vent from the lava’s bubbling under current of Infernal.



Of course it’s for a show….yes, yes-I know I was no longer going to participate in group shows for the foreseeable future-but when the Dumbledore of Dark Art-Chet Zar invites you to the first ever Dark Art Society show at Copro, you don’t hesitate.

What’s with the Gorgon then? Ah well…all will be revealed soon, but I tell you my mind has felt like a nest of snakes (or in this case, eels) lately. Restless, tangled, fermenting.
It’s been like painting my physiognomy manifest.

The show will be opening just in time for the feast of Samhain month, and I’ll post full details along with the completed painting soon.

Paintheism

“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah”
The End-The Doors

“if art can’t tell us, about the world we live in, then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it.”
Robert Hughes-The Mona Lisa Curse

When I refer to my next series as “the Denouement”, I don’t just merely mean as an end to a trinity that began over five years ago. I mean it integrally. Entering this series, has felt like a final act, as if I am just some artistic documentarian on the end times.

And it’s been no stretch, I can tell you-I mean, everything feels like it is entering some sort of HBO grand finale now-even more underwhelming than Game of Thrones, because as apocalypses go, it all seems like business as usual.

An end of social norms, of known truths. Of civility. Of morality. Of intellectualism. Of culture. Of America. Of a future.  Meanwhile, the worlds lungs are an inferno, Ice shelves the size of cities cleave into the ocean, wakes are held for glaciers, and Russian reactors erupt, spewing isotopes into the ether, while the bloviator in chief, postulates the possibility of nuking hurricanes.  All this as the surface is scratched on a remote islands insidious underbelly, where an almost Schnitzler like cabalistic rite of passage, caters to the most vile of tastes and predilections for the rich and the affluent, as another head count for the NRA’s coffers and coffins, beleaguers the morning dreadlines.

It’s all too much to comprehend, particularly at 3am in the small clutch of fevered hours,when it can seem like the doors and windows are off their hinges and the tempests of chaos seem to rage through every vestibule of your mind.

How does an artist navigate these times then, is what we are doing enough or is it ultimately futile? Is the vantage point of being an observer, as desultory as being a passive abstainer? Are we to be like tinkers, commodifying the detritus of a socio political landfill, or alchemists forging the degrado into Instagram gold? Is art’s objective, to be just anthropological, a remnant from our own teetering Roman empire, for some future generation to point fingers and disseminate as some cautionary tale?

And round and around we go.

I read an article by Chris Hedges, The Artist as Prophet-in which he says “The artist makes the invisible visible. He or she shatters the clichés and narratives used to mask reality.” That’s some lofty burden of ambition right there, and he cites quotes from novelists like Russell Banks, and the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, but perhaps more of what he has in mind carries with it the weight of art like Goya’s third of May, or Picasso’s Guernica.
Except, how can art change the paradigm if it is purely post script? Is art only simulacrum and how can it affect us and impart change?

I read with interest some years ago that the color pink, was being used in certain Swiss prisons following a study by psychologist Daniela Späth, as a sort of sedative.  “A certain shade of pink calms the nerves” she had posited, and in fact the statistical results bore out that the inmates were less aggressive, once their cells were tinted flaming flamingo.

For myself, I think I’d last five minutes before screaming blue murder, but my point is that if art, with it’s collision of color and of hue, form and concept is similarly a subjectively unconscious, sublime experience,  then any of its revelations must be transcendentally existential -like codified transcripts that effect us on a psychological level beyond our surface understanding.  A kind of passive aggression-or transgression if you will.

And so I believe that these times that we live in-as imprisoned and terrorized as we feel, and so focused as the wardens seem on imminent destruction-cry out for the retaliation of creation and the creative impulse, more than ever.

For artists, it can be our greatest act of defiance and our most integral role.

Conspiracy Weary

“Healter Skelter”-24″ x 36″ – Oil on canvas (2012)

“I saw Elvis in a potato chip once.”

Fox Mulder, the X-Files

Today marks fifty years since the strata was jolted by news of the Manson killings, and other than the brouhaha around Tarantino’s latest desultory offing, it’s barely warranted a footnote in the press.

Unsurprising really, and frankly warranted, given the eclipsing daily horror show in this country right now. Although, given that both eras represent discriminate murders, initiated by cult members and galvanized by the rantings of a deranged egomaniac, it could be argued that recent headlines could give those of half a century ago a run for their money.

Still, I note the anniversary because of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna showcase, that consumed me through much of 2012.  Back then, bolstered by a literary diet that comprised things like the hefty volumes of Peter Levedna’s Sinister Forces,  Adam Gorightly’s The Shadow over Santa Susana, and every dank rabbit hole on the dark web-I crafted myself a tinfoil hat so tight, I almost microwaved grey matter.

That’s not to undermine the revelations I made during that particular artistic odyssey-I stand by what I said at the time, ” the connections around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies understanding”.
It does however give me a micro speck of insight, into the malaise of modern conspiracy theorists; basement dwellers, pulling on threads so to weave a magical carpet, and comfortably seat their confirmation biases on.

For what began with conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination, Roswell, the moon landing, Manson -has mutated and become the provenience of alt right agitators from 4chan cesspits, promulgating batshit schemes about Pizza parlors and the Earth being flat.
Or mass shootings as false flag events where the victims are crisis actors.

When ultimately, it’s all just another spiritual quest for understanding, a way to mollify the shared human guilt of  barbarism.

In making Gods of our fears, and seeking sense of existence as a wasted byproduct for some omniscient grand plan…one discovers there isn’t any to be measured.

Killing is the ultimate zero sum, self destructive act where man is nihilist,and nothing divine.

You can read my musings from the series, in my book Rise-Man/son and the Haunting of the American Madonna, available from the following link or purchase a signed art print:

Man/son Art book

Healter Skelter Art Print

Manly P Hall

“Ignorance fears all things, falling, terror-stricken before the passing wind. Superstition stands as the monument to ignorance, and before it kneel all who realize their own weakness who see in all things the strength they do not possess” ― Manly P Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry: Or the Secret of Hiram Abiff

 Ala Prima| Oil on canvas | 9”x12”

Manly Palmer Hall then, peering from furrowed brow, as if he was trying to cut glass with his eyes and looking for all the world like a matinee idol from the Golden age.  A sort of mystic Valentino for the ages, or at least their Secret Teachings. 

He’s another one of those forgotten esoteric figures on the fringe, who along with Mathers and Blavatsky, are curios lost to the dusty back rooms of new age bookshops, that no doubt used to line Melrose avenue. 
And until a few years back, his magnum opus-The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, would knock you back a few thousand bucks.

Someone who described himself as a “last resort for troubled people” his considerable acuity and palliative voice, lives on at least in lectures on YouTube, which have been accompanying my painting marathons for a while now. His Icosahedron based on the Golden ratio, even found it’s way into my last series for my painting “The Origins of Death”.
In an era that feels like a “monument to ignorance”, the voluminous spiritual wisdom of MPH are like an antidote.

Painted Ala Prima in one sitting, it’s available for purchase from my store from the following link

MPH Portrait