Chapel of Rest
Oil and acrylic on canvas
150x100cm
Continuing with a common motif of mine: the picture-in-picture effect, this painting features an image that is interlaid with two ‘windows’ offering different images to the main image that fills the majority of the canvas. The painting was initially inspired by Victorian era Christmas cards depicting dead birds, sent to loved ones with a sense of dark humour. The dark humour was continued in the choice of imagery used: in most cases, it would make sense to overlay something as tragic and sullen as a ravaged battlefield with something offering more hope; however, in this case, I decided to overlay it with images of yet more melancholy. The painting doesn’t just exist as a source of humour, however, as it is painted with sensitivity and aims to be absorbed on multiple levels. The industrial slaughter of young men during the First World War marked a shift in the way global power operated and its use of modern technology. The Victorians were morbid people and noted for their contribution to the gothic genre, and the First World War left a shadow over generations of artists who lived through it, creating swathes of artwork that grappled with death and destruction.
Baldur & the Sword
Oil and acrylic on canvas
150x100cm
A painting of an English Bull Terrier named Baldur, a real dog belonging to a good friend, who is seen here grasping a mythical sword with his mouth. The painting is based on a photo of him biting a plastic toy sword, with the sword being sized up and replaced with a real one in the painting process. The image was chosen for its striking quality, the initial reaction to it being concern for the dog, with the knowledge that a sword is very sharp and a dog’s mouth very soft. The image was also chosen for its seemingly symbolic qualities. It resembles the kind of image seen in medieval art, in the illustrations of alchemy books, or perhaps the cryptic symbols of the Freemasons. The piece sits among a series of paintings exploring the Gothic genre and its relevance in the contemporary world. The feeling is that this image could be an archetype, representing something much larger and perhaps quite mystical. To some, however, this painting might not function as a mysterious, elevated concept, but can simply be enjoyed as a playful celebration of the high fantasy genre, and both reactions are equally valid.
Utopia
Oil on canvas
101.5×50.5cm
Another in my series of green paintings. Similar to “Evil Lurks”, this one also features a landscape invented by collaging images of separate locations. However, in this painting, the torn edges of the paper collage pieces and the joins between them are included, providing what looks like cracks in the otherwise idyllic scene. There is a continuity between each image, which presents as one landscape, but the jumping in colour and shape leaves the scene disjointed and fractured. A theme that can be gleaned from this piece is that of the climate crisis, history’s biggest threat to the utopian view of natural beauty. The cracks appearing in the landscape insinuate the beginning of a collapse. But the idea that remained with me whilst making the piece was of the dark underside of nature, which is omnipresent and inseparable from the utopian aspects of nature. The idea of evil and good as two sides of the same coin, the balance of chaos and order, light and dark and other readings of duality in philosophy and religion. The idea that nature contains an element of evil in its beauty is part of Gothic and romantic fiction and art, a core theme of all my explorations.
Evil Lurks
Oil, acrylic, paint pen and spray paint on canvas.
Another painting in the greenery series. The motif painted on top of the landscape resembles patterns more often seen in tattooing, a kind of contemporary reworking of the 90s (now infamous) tribal designs (for want of a better term), which has come to be known as “cybersigilism”, a visual style that has really taken off in tattooing the past few years. But it is also inspired by the towers and details on gothic churches, the angular and sharp shapes on the buildings and armour of the evil characters in Lord of the Rings, and the concrete spikes used to demarcate areas where radioactive waste is buried: the attempt of architects to use a visual language of evil and danger to warn potential intelligent life thousands of years in the future to steer clear. I’m interested in how these sharp and angular curves are read as malicious and non-human across many cultures and throughout history. I felt that laying this visual over a landscape would imply a mysterious evil within an otherwise twee and idyllic depiction of nature. The landscape is by default non-descript as it was painted from a collage of different landscapes from all over the world, but it seems to lend itself to the rugged beauty of Scandinavian landscapes, invoking the strange pagan practices that continue in some regions to this day, originally condemned as black magic and satanic by the church.