Winter 2024 - From the Studio

What Am I Doing in the Studio?

This might be a bit long.

I am currently working on some very large paintings (2mtx1.8mt) along a rather dark and scary theme. I have wanted to pursue this for a few years with all the 'strange' things going on in our world but I was not sure how to deal with the rush of energy coming at me. How to portray it all? How to not be a 'cartoonist'. How to not state the obvious? How to say it, in a way that recreates the story as a new story. What is the point for artists unless they do this. Why bother paint unless you can transform and make something new from what you see? Why bother being a camera, when you can be a 'crazy god' with your brush?

This has been the challenge as the actual live story in our world right now, is unfolding more strangely than fiction. As an image maker, I can barely keep up, jaw agape; I am in awe at 'their' (that be the monsters) dastardly emboldened audacity! My sketchbooks kept looking like 'cliche' dictionaries upon attempting to catch them. Everything that's happening on the news every day, is like a badly written series of the Road Runner and Coyote on repeat. You know what's coming next, but they do it anyway! To be honest, 'the globalist monsters' have pretty much outdone me for setting the pace on bizarre.

Shakespeare's "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here" comes to mind every day. And don't tell me not to look. That's like telling a cat not to...

I have found myself falling into asking the paint for help by pulling images out of the unconscious. It's been ages since I have been able to tap into that properly. It's so good to have found it again.

My time at the farm, 'Armageddon', has been very hard at times, and I have been sure I made a huge mistake, leaving my lovely thing on the hill, but only now it's starting to sink in that what I needed was to unhook myself from decades of being trapped in the past by continuing to sell the prints and stay still. Most of the images on offer were from commercial paintings done twenty-plus years prior! So they kind of kept me locked in a sense of not growing. These were works that were pushing into a tourism market! I had to get rid of them for that reason alone. I know people enjoy them and that is wonderful, but they were a chain on my leg.

I have spent a lot of time here, doing a lot of self-loathing, doubting, and denying I even am an artist after 35 years of waving a brush around on material. Thoreau's Walden is a shoe size chart in comparison to the depths of my navel-gazing since being kidnapped by this end of days farm.

Anyway, back to the painting. I had to at least try, so I did. The anticipation of starting ended when I just stapled the canvas rolls on the walls of that gorgeous big white studio. It's not looking so 'minimally pure' now! I was intimidated by those new, too-clean, too-white snobs of gyprock. A nagging voice kept saying - "This would make a great gallery if you didn't throw all your crap all over the place". Suffice to say, the voice has been fed to the chooks, and I am embedded and surrounded by a growing wallpaper of monsters.

Do not ask me who in the world will want to buy these things. To be honest, I can't even think of that. I don't care! It has to be done, and that is all there is now. The beasties must be demasked. Stay tuned. I expect to have enough of a body of work in about six months to present. It will be my largest ever. I have not yet worked out where I will show it, but something eccentric and grand would be nice and it will manifest. Build it and they will come.

June 2024