Wrath

Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword.”

Revelation 6:4

Wrath
Oil on Canvas
36″ x 48″

And so a bloodied harbinger, one of John of Patmos’s magic mushroom induced four. Like a butchers castoff wrenched from the pit of Hades, gallops the crimson steed stripped of its artifices. Give it up then for deaths own points man, here to cleave empires into ferocious war and division. Hooray!
Here he is, sporting the latest fall fashions- jodhpurs and jackboots, along with a swordfish head resembling a Klansman’s hood or a papal Mitre: a false crown for hell’s Borgia general: the preferred head dress of demagogues and blood thirsty zealots. There’s enough in the capes fountain to quench them I believe.  And if there’s any doubt as to which festering dark stable unleashed our Mr (D)Ed, then a blind, rabid diamondback coils from the animated corpses cold dead fist – Gadsen’s relic co-opted as every risible little bumper sticker-now waving into view like Satan’s own spewing cock.

If after all of that, you missed the carrion call of our horseback messenger, the lightning bolt clutched aloft also trebles as a Sig rune, cross and spear of destiny. Talk about the unholy trinity of Swiss army knives eh?
No prizes for guessing what fireworks awaits at the finish line, but I’d wear sunblock if I were you.

Yes, I realize I’m posting this on Independence day, but look-I began this one on 12,21,12- the Aztec dooms date-so  this piece was forged for these end times.
So here we are, July 4th baring down upon this once great nation like funerary pallbearer-one more last supper culminating in a glittering firecracker of whizz bang and char grilled offal.
How depressingly apt, eh?
Two plus millennia that includes a historical cannon of almost mythological prowess-names like Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy echoing through the grand halls of history, all diminished by the wet, shrill, reverberating fart of a coiffed, bloviating, bowel, tweeting in an ill fitting suit. An ignoble and all too fitting end I suppose, if only because the American dream has become a nightmare.

Nostrovia Comrades.

If we’re all still here come November, it’ll be on view at Copro’s upcoming Underworld group show.

Riding a dark horse.

Back in the saddle on this one then.  Pushing my charge to the finish line while I manifest the next series.  If memory serves, I began this one at a live painting event at the Ruby Room in San Diego, on what was purportedly a Mayan predictor to the end times-12/21/12. Of course, it turned out to be the usual load of apocalyptic bollocks, but given the current state of world events, one wonders whether the countdown to midnight was merely set in motion on that date.

Each day feels like a dark revelation in new levels of madness now, a hangman’s breakfast for a world ever on the precipice of some fresh horror, all delivered by a bloviating buffoon tweeting diatribes of inanity and petty gripes, like an indignant, salivating ape lobbing feces.  And whilst my beloved England comes to grips with another night of deadly attacks by radicalized zealots, the true modern day terrorism it seems is on the collective psyche.

For one of the envisioned pieces, I’ve been researching Jonestown and Heavens Gate, and though I’ve grazed the draw of cultism before of course with the Man/son series,  it’s been unnerving not to draw parallels with the ease by which the masses can be so easily subjugated here.  As if the contemporary pied pipers are political and pastoral pontificates, enchanting with arias of disenchantment, hypnotizing the dogmatically obstinate. In these dark days, it’s hard not to feel like all is lost, like the experimental petri dish marked mankind has mutated into some monstrous pathogen.

Which reminds me, I watched my friend Chet Zar’s wonderful documentary “I like to paint monsters” the other day, and he said something in it which really struck a chord, and to paraphrase, it was that dark art makes sense of a dark world that doesn’t. It’s a moving and hugely inspiring film if you haven’t seen it (please do), but it reminded me that the artists role is more important than ever, and that I’ll keep doing my part to fathom the unraveling shitstorm, in the event that we make it for future generations to disseminate.

Cereal Killing

There are moments when I feel like I’m more of an anthropologist than a dauber. I have to remind myself that the genesis of any new series always kicks off like this though, relentlessly poring through acres of text digging for clues, trying to line up all the executioners. It’s exciting and frustrating by equal measure.

And what a rabid band of cut-throat miscreants, rapscallions and sea dogs I’m conjuring to inhabit my Eden, beginning with no less than genocidal pioneer-Christopher Columbus. He makes Manson look like a Scooby Doo villain. If only hadn’t been for those damn kids.

It’s a lot to unpack, and at times I feel like I’m eating breakfast between Dan Brown and Alex Jones.
Should I order waffles or fruit loops?

Making a little Eden

No, I haven’t shuffled off this mortal coil.  Not yet. A moral one perhaps, and rather fittingly for these end of days, it’s more of a spiral than a coil, but I digress.

If I’m honest, hitting the half-century mark has felt like a need to hit some sort of reset button. David Van Gough version 5.0. Software updates to include curmudgeonly scowling at the car radio, dodgy knees and a complete  shutdown by 11:30pm.  “Forget that I’m fifty cos you just got paid.”

So in between the manna of commission duties, I’ve been brewing. Stewing. Boiling. Scrawling. And for all the buzzing in my head, it feels like I’m preparing a soup made of flies. Next on the menu, Paradiso’s Fall. If Purgatorium was the entree of a three-course meal, this one is the main. It’ll taste strangely delicious, trust me.

Of course, it’s meant retreating again, closing up shop at La Bodega, dispensing with the three-hour daily commute and wandering no further than the canvases in my little-converted studio/garage down the hill. Not a soul other than the ones that haunt my visions. No sound, other than the whispering pines, the cackle of crows, and the usual voices in my head.

In these dark days of endless noise and looming annihilation,  it’s as close to Eden as one can hope to get.

Half a century away

If I’m honest. I never thought I’d make it to my half century. I imagined the long shadow cast by the reaper over much of my life, would have caught up with me by now.

Twenty years ago, I might have invited it to.

Ah, the nihilism and self-destruction of callow youth eh?

Still, I made it regardless, far happier, blessed and fortunate than any other dauber from the back jiggers of Liverpool might have reason to hope for.

Hindsight has also provided me the knowledge that as much as times change, some things remain the same.  For myself, it’s been that unrelenting need to make art.

Which is why I thought it might be quite nice to put together a little video retrospective of work from the  70’s to present day. Also notable I suppose, is that for the very first time (and possibly the last) it includes a little musical accompaniment composed and performed by myself throughout.

Looking back over the body of my work these last few weeks, it’s been interesting to note that regardless of any evolution in style or technique, there’s been a common thread through my work that has remained constant: those same niggling questions of mortality, and it could be a coping mechanism for the ‘comprehensible darkness’ as Jung called it, or simply because I am ‘still a kid at heart’ as my wife-Lani says, but I can’t deny the almost neurotic obsession that has been there from childhood scrawl to sprawling canvas.

I imagine it will be that way until the darkness swallows me.

Illusion Magazine article

“His paintings are complex, for where there is kitsch and playfulness, there is also discomfort and violence, together gesturing towards an inevitable end for the bodies and cultural eras they depict.”

Hayley Evans-Illusion Magazine

Whilst I am sequestered on commission duties, here is a superbly eloquent article about yours truly. Thank you Hayley and Illusion mag. The title alone “Rot and Transformation” could be a career manifesto:

Read Here

Fake News Schism

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

6.5″ x 8″-Mixed Media on Ingres paper

Its just a sketch tossed off in a couple of hours, the culmination of feeling like one’s head has been encased in concrete for six months.

Except to say, it encapsulates entirely the tumult of these politically divisive times, where falsehoods are legitimized as alternative facts, where lies are filtered through a monocle of partisan bias, where reality has no cachet because everything does.