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My Critical Evaluation

Observations:

My submission was: Noumena. (Installation: Uzumaki – Practice based submission) 

For the Major Project I wanted to follow the same model as my ‘Beyond Dogma’ essay and its eventual practice based submission, as in, I wanted to make a submission that would focus on practically representing the themes of my last essay. Consequentially, This project has a strict focus on attempting to represent the physical answer to these questions through installation: 

1. How can Horror as an assumedly lesser genre of art within discourse exist in a high concept contemporary art based environment? 

2. Is it even possible to elevate such a genre to that of a higher academic level within Fine Art practice?

 My response to these questions was to hone in on my previously established interests in publishing, exhibition, and generally spreading my work online to grow my portfolio, thusly to spread this discourse into the opinions of outside institutions and the audience on my social medias. As the project has less concern with deepening my research due to this switch to a practical mindset, the subtextual elements can fall flatter than my last essay, and would in future need far more attention to really emphasis the widespread influence on this discourse already in literature and pop culture generally. However, I did still caption every single piece that was featured to offer any and all context where appropriate, and the project itself is full of documentation of each stage of development, and of all the minor details that went into bringing my project together by the time of the installation. 

 As discussed throughout all promotional and published material for the installation, this project is based on the Kantian subject of ‘The Noumenal World’, in summary, the world beyond our sensibilities and defined reason, the world as it actually is, and yet the unimaginable world too. My conceptual references remained the same from my last essay, and my practical focus came from wanting to adapt the references and aesthetics of Junji Ito into a high art context. In turn, taking Ito’s concept of ‘Uzumaki’ and its subtext of the value of the macro and microcosmic potential of horror medias as allegory, and transforming it into an exhibition and series of published books. This push for physical reference and representation is in line with my advocacy for debating and promoting the importance of physical media within contemporary art and academia, against the current attitudes on digital decadence and the idea of streamlining the future of culture through non phenomenal means. 

 An aim of the project was to make as much work as I physically could (120 pieces being featured in the installation by the end, with atleast close to 250 mix media and resolution pieces documented), and diversify my work where it counted, and spreading the work into as much public forum as possible to get it out and there and recognised by more institutions and potential collaborators.

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Evaluation: 

Compared to my last project, ‘Noumena’ is its total inverse. The flipping of priorities from literary to practical was due to the majority of my effort being focused on bolstering my physical portfolio, while also wanting to focus on creating a strong proof of concept for the potential of future curatorial and commissioned projects past the MA. I also wanted to focus on creating a submission that could work as a publication, an online portfolio through my social media and website, and eventually as an installation to further promote the current ambitions of my practice overall through a public forum. The installation in particular having been chosen over the dissertation, was influenced be me wanting to prove that my work could exist in a high/ professional contemporary art context, and exist beyond semantical and hypothetical research alone. A lot of persistent testing, designing and debate with Mona went into making the installation possible, and without any technical issues following suit. An immediate reward for my efforts as of the show’s opening, was being acknowledged by the visiting members of the IKON, of which are now currently looking to meet with me to discuss the future of my practice after witnessing the potential of my work at the School of Art. 

On the project as a whole however, it was so much more about illustrating the ideas of my last essay and giving them a physical representation. This was all in the efforts of not only making up for the lack of practical work in the last project in a significant way, but because I wanted to be featured in more outlets, so I had to make more original work to accommodate this constant challenge. A challenge of which I frequently documented throughout the entirety of my project, to hopefully show the efforts I am going to, to build my cv etc. This meant the primary mission of ‘Noumena’ had to be about making my concepts into an artistic resolution that could elevate my ideas beyond the conceptual and strictly academic. While my research doesn’t do more than elaborate on themes already established in my practice, I did spend hundreds of hours trying to show the capabilities of my practical skills. I again changed my medium to great effect and worked to bolster its style, consistency, prolificness and overall potential to exist on multiple platforms and in multiple contexts in the final installation, from the publications and their insight into the work, to even the design of my business cards. 

 This is why my blog can read more like a quest to evidence every opportunity, aspect of the practical work and installation testing, rather attempting to significantly deepen the pre-established ideas of my research. Yet I chose not to care so much about the conceptual side, because I felt my aspirations to study a PhD soon will accommodate this much better, and this was also discussed frequently in my research too. At this very early stage in my career, I wanted to represent the current challenges of making my practice more professional and prolific again after losing the direction of my practice when writing my last essay. So, focusing on documenting cover letters, competitions, interview transcripts, collaborations and potential professional advancement (applying for residencies, fellowships, prizes and exhibitions etc), seemed more important to me overall. I didn’t want to hide where my attention was being directed, and this project was after all about getting our work out and into the public to begin making our networks with the contemporary scene. 

 Concerning my leading questions for this project, I don’t fully know if I have fulfilled them, while the show was a clear success and my presence on the contemporary scene, as well as my confidence towards being an active member in it, has grown and vastly improved; I can’t but feel I didn’t do my research as much justice. Admittedly, I did lose interest in repeating myself within the research, as I felt that if new concepts were going to be discussed I would need to be less practically motivated and wanting to submit less for the overall submission. However, I have no regrets about how much work I made and the amount of documentation and development I was able to carry out, even if that meant the research had to take more of a backseat this time around. 

 But I can argue that I did elevate horror art and pessimistic philosophy to a higher academic and conceptual level, considering I am in contact with far more organisations who want to feature my work and I am now contacting such figures as Eugene Thacker to make myself far more known in the niche I am wanting to assimilate with. I only hope that the work submitted for this project represents my efforts as worthwhile, and that the current potential of my work would set a good example for what I may be getting up to in the near future, especially if I am able to secure residencies and hopefully more prizes and shows in future. And with this current boost to my portfolio and the professional outcome I was able to afford and put together off of my own back, is some of my favourite work to date, that shows the hundreds of hours that went into making this project possible.

 Overall, I see this project as a strong launch pad into my professional career, as I have already been featured in one show this project and have plans to grow my cv all the more while studying a PhD in Art and Design this coming February.

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The 63, Part 7:

61. Taboo: This piece seems too self explanatory enough for anyone who even knows the most subtle things about fetish gear and has read the entirety of these captions up to now. With this being more of fetish play type visual to represent the idea of the taboo altogether it’s certainly more a Robert Mapplethorpe or Rick Owens type facade than the work that inspired it, as I was reading alot of Bataille while making this piece at the time, and his ideas on the taboo speak on the fact that the taboo is a naturally occurring and evolutionary response to how mankind handles it’s darkest elements. As in Eroticism (1957), Bataille speaks of time when our consciousness became so evolved that we started burying our dead and dressing more modestly when we realised just how confrontational the reality of nature could be, and that we became toilers and hard workers steeped in ritualistic practices to found civilised orders based on our fears of being totally one with nature again, in turn, wanting to avoid the very presence of mankind and it’s true nature as an animal and a pleasure seeking beast. Though I am paraphrasing and this image certainly isn’t primeval looking in anyway, this portrait speaks to our contemporary idea of the taboo, that of the darker and deeper secrets and controversial conversations of human history as always being reflected on the human condition, and in turn dangerous for the things they make sensible people question, yet they are always shrouded in this sense of an almost always sexual excitement, as if walking into the abyss can yield greater reward and satisfaction against the mundanity of work and civil culture. 

62. Fleck: After all my notes on species superiority and how Lovecraft takes this topic and utterly demoralises it through his work, this piece is a rumination on said ideas, after all, he sees and accepts that humanity is a fleck of light in an infinite abyss of blackness, of which we are not entitled to be authorities over, and the potential to be alone in such a never ending space is such a ridiculous concept, as life is the most abstract concept in philosophy as it can exist in cells, bacteria, fungus, gases and dust, after all, how can we really be the standard for life and logic, when we are one out of billions of other species on Earth? And we only live for under a century on average, and most plant life can live much longer than we can just by feeding off of the nutrients in soil. It’s the most common theme in works of weird fiction and cosmic pessimism alike, as they both want to speak on the idea of existences more intelligent and advanced than humanity, while at the same time making sure that they are by no means just a humanoid that represents a higher state of man, avoiding god complexes and the average super hero stereotype that you see everywhere now. Pessimistic writers and their fictional counterparts in literature of heroes like Lovecraft all share one common goal, and that is to redefine the value we place on meaninglessness and our self-imposed suffering against it when creating dogmas to avoid it, they want to use meaningless to prove that creative and true philosophical thinking should not be limited to sensible human logic, nor should it biased towards humanity and it’s ego, it should always look beyond the pale and assumed to create new meaning out of nothingness, a new meaning that is capable of pushing past humanities distractions from their true fears found in the potential of the universe beyond us. 

63. Shrink: It’s odd that this is the last image of this collection, as I only finished with this piece so that I could cap off another collection, while at the same time making it that my overall exhibition collection would equal 120, to make up for the failed ambition I had in Soma Volume 1 to make 120 pieces in tribute to Sade and my surrealist influences by proxy, of course I’ve massively over shot this number when totalling all the resolved materials, but it’s still an important foot note to me personally. Bar all that, this piece was based on my studies into the book ‘Morbid Curiosities’ by Paul Gambino (2016), Paul interviewed over 10 various collectors, all specialising in one area of collection in particular, some collect all Halloween costumes and Ouija boards, some collection murder weapons from crime scenes and paintings from serial killers, some collect wax medical figures and preserved human remains and the remains of animals too, but one thing that seemed eerily common, was the collection of shrunken heads, from circuses, indigenous tribes and from long dead explorers of the world who sold these trinkets like pop corn at a cinema. Paul’s opinion on artefacts such as these and what they represent, is that we often smother ourselves with images and objects that represent the finality of death and the truest of alternative, so as to break the taboo and find it’s presence comforting rather than alarming, and shrunken heads have just always sat in a strange zone between the uncanny and the humorous to me, as shrunken heads are often pocket size and yet still are the heads of people either executed or murdered out of spite, some people even being killed so their head can sold as a shrunken head in the history of colonialism. Shrunken heads are just so uncanny due to them being so cartoonish when it comes to representations of entropy and death generally speaking, acting almost as a caricature on how we shrink in the face of finality and it’s mortal connotations, making us into feeble being in it’s terrifying wake, so I drew a head as featured in Paul’s book and thought I would give it a place in this collection as it finished the body of work rightfully so. 

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The 63, Part 6:

51. Onlooker: This piece gets alot more detail in the next caption, but in general this piece is frankly about the Baconian use of the onlooker as a sub subject within post modern art, almost representing a loathing for the audience themselves, something I’m sure me and Bacon would agree on whole heartedly. The thing we agree on being that too many people live their life passively, the watch it walk past them each morning resign their bodies to be idle husks when they retire in their free time, and because they aren’t naturally interesting or insightful to be around, all they can do is use the window and the life of others to fuel their existence, they treat the TV as their cleric and their family as expendable when intervening in their factory lifestyle of finding all that life offers unamusing, unless they tokenise it and treat actual human experience as something to see purely as entertainment and fuel for their idealisms of the world. Being solely an onlooker in life who doesn’t host exciting conservation and an intellect or charm that is worth sharing, makes you a passive part of a regressive and dumber society that can only get dumber the more passively collectivist people become, and I honestly find it gross that we could ever allow this to happen to us. How can we be proud of ourselves when we allow ourselves and our peers to take shortcuts and give up on the harder, truer round to success, and in the process deter people from growing an independent mind and personality, damn the sensibilities of everyone else would support such a lifestyle and their parents for raising such insolent people. We are inventing machines and tools to take shortcuts at all costs, and with god to punish people’s insolence and irresponsibility, they have inadvertently accepted their fate in a aimless and nihilistic society, that would rather debate the medicine of an issue over finding the cure in introspective interrogation in relation to their fear of the world outside of their bubble in the world as it actually is in the noumena. Maybe it’s just because I’m an art student and I actively hate the idea of culture regressing as it counters my very purpose and mission in society, but why in any name of any idol or idea, would people seriously believe that a happy life is one made entirely out of insecure and imitative living? Why not confront the Noumenal knowing full well it will take a piece of, but in exchange you’ll learn so much more about yourself and the reality of the world, and eventually find the darkness and abyss of existence far more awakening and sobering than the screen burn you would get from watching life digitally pass you by?

52. Eavesdropper: This piece is based on the Baconian idea of the voyeur as not just an onlooker but a spectator who can’t help but pervade each intimate detail and conversation they find themselves stumbling across, and social media has certainly made this obsessive behaviour all the more profitable and sardonic with advent of selling data and people needing VPNs just to access their human right to protected privacy (so long as they don’t infringe on the law, but of course, infringing on the law nowadays could mean saying anything considered offensive by the minority of the population, or by the act of making a joke that is utterly subjective, even in your own home, thought crime being the natural progression of aggressive state powers soon enough). The Eavesdropper is the natural progression of the mere onlooker, as they actively soak themselves in gossip, outrage and idle conversation to the point of having no personality themselves, as they live vicariously through the models they follow and the films they aspire to mimic in their own life, it certainly makes for a weaker and more submissive person when their entire life is based on being totally devoted to fashion and the current distractionary talking points. 

53. Niccolo: I based this piece on my studies into Machiavelli, and upon reading ‘The Social Contract’ (1762) by Jean Jacques Rousseau years ago, It made me realise just how deeply misunderstood Niccolo actually is, after all he exposed the system to the public long before Orwell did, by writing ‘The Prince’ (1532) as a manual on how to be aware of the power moves at play at all times as made by those looking to control you, and so it is often understood that he is snake like being who wrote all of this treatise on political science so as to expose himself as a master manipulator, when in actuality he never truly belonged among the elite and wrote ‘The Prince’ to prove just how corrupt power can make people, especially the bipolar wannabe Dauphin Cesare Borgia of which the book is based heavily upon. However, I still can’t help but admire his more snakey assumptions, it keeps idiots away from his work and diluting the ideas of his work for their own amusement, it’s the same with Anton Szandor LaVey, yet Anton wrote openly about how he employed scare tactics and overtly shocking ideas in his work to deter idle and slacking viewers from reading and taking his ideas for themselves, it always keeps the simple minded away from complex issues, and in turn, leave the dialog to those who actually make the effort to read the original source material, which says alot about how people still don’t just read iconic works of literature because they want to live in an ignorant society where no one makes the time to read important works. It’s why in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451′ (1953) he openly talks about how people one day commit mass book burnings and see information and the ability to interpret information and critical media as a weapon against the state. It’s why we see so often the odd conspiracy theorist talking about the state and social media keeping you dumb so they can control you better, the very things that Niccolo talked about just under half a millennium ago, and excuse me for adopting the tin foil hat, but who really would think other wise, people won’t read because they don’t believe it’s worth the time, and yet they’ll waste their brain matter on idle conversation and meaningless materiality, look in the mirror and tell me you aren’t a part of that problem and accepting your sedation, I dare you. 

54. Do To: This piece is based on the Baconian idea of the victim of ultra-violence and the object of our voyeuristic entertainment in crucifixion, the original reference once being closer to Ian Curtis of Joy Division fame, but past the initial sketch phase the face became so much more haunted and bloodshot with sadness piped through the tear ducts and their wobbling jowl. This image is supposed to represent the ugliness in victimisation and the pain of the victims under the doer and the provocateur as their torturer, again you can see and debate ideas on sadomasochism as is typical of my work now, but the main idea is that of the human cost between the Baconian idea of the Doer and their aim for power for general authority through violence as their primary resolution, a thing that often underpins every interaction between men and their peers, the assumed role of violence thusly never changing in thousands of years. 

55. Focus: This image is another preconscious idea, that of the face out of focus and out of cognitive range. It almost represents the earliest forms of the Mirror stage as Laid out by Lacan, in that when the human mind is finally capable of recognising it’s own face and the faces of others and their connection to themselves introspectively, this relationship with identity and faces generally starts to become all the more important in our social and psychosomatic development from our infantile phase right up until early adulthood. The ability to distinguish various identities and to see the value we base our own identity and artifice on from the appearances and the importance of facial expressions from others, becomes quite the skill when reading social situations and becomes a contemporary tool for navigating homogenised society. Not being able to see the minor nuances and differences between authentic facial characteristics and false ones can lead you into danger, it’s almost our evolutionary camouflage when dealing with contemporary civility, and why it’s now so commonly argued that the most sociopathic and psychopathic people practice facial expressions and acting with their face and tone to lure and trick people. Another theme to discuss I guess, is finding light in the darkness, finding faces in darkness in particular, something my practice has been obsessed with since starting this project and it can be see in all the black background pieces, after all, to see in the dark you have to let your eyes focus on what light there is left to be refracted into your eyes so that you can comprehend your surrounds, another trait of our eye’s evolution. And the ability to focus on dark subjects and still time and time again to be able to pull new faces and ideas out of the darkness is one of my current skills that I want to master, as I’m hoping this project can certainly add in evidencing that development. I guess another idea would be, that if we focus on the dark and ambiguous enough, our sense of logic and cognitive potential will eventually make shapes and assumptions out of things that we were never meant to be reasoned with in the noumenal world and the unknown more generally, it’s why this portrait ended up looking like a self-portrait without me even playing that and honestly that does creep me out sometimes to think that my brain made an automatic self-portrait without much thought. 

56. Doer: If the ‘Do To’ is the involuntary masochist, then there always has to be a butcher and sadist generally to do the punishment, it’s a symbiotic relationship as I’ve already explained to death at this point. And this piece is no different, as it was original based on my previous depiction of the Duc from ‘120 days of Sodom’ as made for ‘Beyond Dogma’:

The Duc being a sadist in the most exaggerated and ridiculous sense, even for Sade it would saying alot to make this distinction from the average sadist for sure. This time the mouth is open and ready to commit to the bit and the eventual bite, the idea of the Doer in Baconian terms is about speaking on those who either are consumed by their inner instincts to thrive and push the weak out of the way, those beasts in waiting making their way through life with little care for morals and conventional opinion, law and the status quo generally, the taboo among the few so to speak. But everyone is capable of Jung’s idea of the shadow, that being the darker aspects of our psyche and cognitive potential and even figures like Jordan Peterson now believe that this awareness and control over the shadow is what makes strong and powerful people, but having no control over it makes you as self and socially destructive as you can possibly be, for example it’s the difference between being a Mark Twain or a Charles Bukowski, having a strong mindset and an autonomous attitude to the rest of society can go either way, you either become the rebel without a cause and feed societal nihilism, or you become the in control monster that is the epitome of a strong work ethic and philosophies that represent overcoming your natural and self-cannibalising instincts, but it’s a fine balance and that’s what being human is all about, being able to moderate the very worst potential of others, while at the same time wanting to be the best of ourselves and in control of our emotions without totally supressing or giving into them wholeheartedly. It’s the dichotomy between sadist and masochist becomes such an important dialogue in contemporary sociality and Bacon knew why, because there was always going to be victims and there is always going to be powerful people holding themselves back from lashing out like a bull upon seeing a matador waiting to be gored. But it’s often made clear, that it’s better to be a soldier in the garden, than a gardener at war, and if we were to see the world as a floating abattoir approving of another execution every few minutes and seconds as argued by Blaise Pascal, then you have to choose between the passive victim of the system, or the active aggressor against it no matter the backlash and reclusivity. 

57. Ghost: This image is based on Francis Bacon’s idea of fact and truth leaving a ghost, that experience and the presence of an issue leaves a mark, and it often is reflected in art, as art often imitates allegory and metaphorical representations of the truth, in turn making shadows of the actual and the obvious, which is why this piece is one of the most abstract and simple pieces of this entire project. I made this piece simple and almost spectral though because it had to represent the looming presence of what my work represents in contemporary philosophy, art and interpersonal dialogue, it’s a haunting practice that looms like a ghost over people’s optimism and hides behind their avoidance of difficult issues and their frustration with ignorance in the face of the unknown. And though Francis Bacon never outright spoke on post-modernity as his fundamental influence, you can’t help but think he was making work that was figuratively dark and surrealistic enough that it had to consider post-modern methodologies and research topics such as nihilism and the contemporary struggle with identity in a nihilistic society. Which is why Bacon believes truth has a ghost, it isn’t merely an objective idea that makes a truth, but it’s the effect and impact it has on people and their opinions that leaves the vapour of a haunting about them, as if learning about the actual cruelty and depraved potential of humanity and it’s crimes against nature and it’s own kin leaves a feeling of disturbing energy over the atmosphere people discover this truth. And in dealing with the world as it is you can’t help but yourself disturbed by the ghosts of history and the catastrophes awaiting in the future once you leave your sensible and conventional conditioning in the dust behind you. 

58. Def: This piece is a running tradition of mine, as for every project I have ever worked on, there has always been one self-portrait, without fail (unless it’s an essay of course, but even then my essays are always self-reflective and that’s only natural for an author of my kind who works so introspectively all the time.). The examples of the MA being these:

Beyond Dogma:

Soma Volume 1:

After these previous cases, looking all glum and out of hand, this last self-portrait is an emblem of my current comforts and ease in spite of all the stresses and challenges I have ahead of me, after all, I finally see my current portfolio as worth sharing and expanding upon. The reason for this new level of confidence is because I have actually been sharing my work a lot more this year and have found the response to be wonderful, people enjoy what I do and don’t fail to let me know in their own ways, thusly it feels really good to find a style that suits my themes and allows me to flourish on social media and my own personal life as the result, I feel less inclined to diversify or be the ultimate illustrator I was so pressured into being during my BA. So my final self-portrait on the MA is a focused and content me looking into the future with a newly attained hope for the future of my career after coming all the way through the hardships of the MA. The addition of hair is only a comment on how I care less about my own self-imposed pressures in life, after all, I don’t allow myself to function and make as much quality work as I do when I live in my insecurities and anxieties all piped up in my head and worry about anything and everything. This in turn becomes my own slight grin after two years of constant effort and continual momentum. 

59. The Ladies Fall: This image is based on Hogarth’s ‘The Enraged Musician’ (1741):

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enraged_Musician

This print for some reason caught my attention clearly, just that beggar women singing ‘The Ladies Fall’ in rags to the annoyance of the musician trying to practice reminded me of my own irritations with trying to focus amongst over people and in the public generally, it’s said to be a symptom of dyspraxia, this sensitivity of hearing and impatience with people and their habits. I drew on the women here in Baconian take of my own just to focus on the irritation, that even though I wouldn’t be able to help myself from feeling sorry for her and her baby, I also wouldn’t be able to stop myself from utterly hating her if she disturbing my thinking and ability to calm myself when immensely anxious, it’s often why I am so reclusive on the daily and find immense comfort in solitude and hermitage of course. But I see that as what Hogarth wanted to represent, he wanted to depict and have you sympathise with those struggled the most, without depicting those same people in the most idealistic image, such is the profound work of Hogarth that he always cuts through the hubbub of typical humanitarianist romanticism to make an image worth debating when representing the public and the mindset of the individuals who struggle to deal with them. You can sympathise with both parties here for sure, but where you lean says alot about you and your priorities, and I know I side with the musician everytime, in turn taking the active role of the misanthrope in most situations, and I haven’t found a print that better represents this conflict of social connectivity and the issues of homogenised living any better than Hogarth here. The third option to consider as you do with all Hogarth works, is how do you feel as the onlooker, the audience to this scene of paradoxical concern, of individualism versus the state and the state’s condition versus the state of individualism as trying to survive in the state? Bar all that, I really like this image due to it’s Baconian style and that’s because it was partially based on this painting by Bacon (From the ‘Three figures at the base of a crucifixion’ triptych, 1944) an image of which I even have tattooed onto my left arm I love it that much:

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bacon-three-studies-for-figures-at-the-base-of-a-crucifixion-n06171

60. Rake: This image is based on Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (1735) and this print in particular:

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-a-rakes-progress-plate-8-t01794

This image of the rake in Bedlam, assigned to a final death that is akin to hell on earth, living as a mad spike among prudish society, yet even though the rake was such a hellfire man in his life, his excesses and dependency on a decadent lifestyle as a devout libertine and swindler finally comes back on him, and I’ve always loved this present because of its finality, way ahead of it’s time and almost embodying the same energy as ‘The Caprices’, it is utterly depressing and introspectively brilliant. You see the rake’s progress is an academic PSA on how a life of excessive pleasure and avoiding problems and difficult decisions in life can ruin a fully sane person, and it’s not an overnight solution or problem, but it does represent those who do look for instant gratification and why they are dangerous in any society. As only those who are willing to make all human relationships and ethics expendable are predicted to live just as the seeds they sowed, their life is forfeit when they play against nature and fight against it’s eventual reclaim on their life. It says alot about how people assume a life of abundance and the internalised temporary immortality that comes with it are the ideal way of living, but even Hogarth saw the crux to this argument long before the aristocracy would ever learn to accept it, and that is that excess always returns to you, so if you live excessively, than you die excessively, and the pain you avoided in life, only comes back harder the longer you attempt to numb and drown it out. It’s why the rake goes from being fitted for suits and living off of the wealth of 10 men’s lifetime earnings, to ripping his own hair out by the strand and needing to be shackled to the floor while he drowns into his own self-harm scars, it’s the same reason why a car travelling at extreme speeds is owed a catastrophic crash, it’s just logical physics acting the way nature intended. And speaking on accelerationism both literarily and philosophically, Nietzsche and philosophers like Nick Land see our current struggles with dealing with a nihilistic futurism to only be such a large issue because we excessively avoid dealing with and confronting our problems (internally and socially) to the point of killing of ourselves with our own decadence, it’s why in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (1872) Nietzsche discusses that the empire run by the ancient Greeks was run into the ground due to them running out of enemies and turning on each other, their decadence and overall hubris in the face of conquering the landscape and living in the privilege of being an unstoppable power, made them their own worst enemy, and so came the great crash that is the downfall of all empires and power structures that lose sight of their original meaning. Having control over your vices and way of life is just as important as treating yourself and finding pleasure in the subtle, self-bought things and the earned things that choose to enjoy too, as in Satanism we have one fundamental law on pleasure ‘Indulgence not compulsion’, compulsion and dependency makes reckless addicts and men-children who can’t face their problems. Our generation now is compelled to dependency on materialistic interests and excessive habitual relationships with porn, drinking, drugs and misinformation, it’s no wonder people aren’t having children or creating life long careers anymore, it’s easier to be excessive and numb, than hardworking and aware, no matter how hard life is I would rather be stone cold sober and see my issues as challenges to overcome, rather than regressing back into the excesses of my past and living like a man-child, something the rake still represents to this day. 

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

The 63, Part 5:

41. Illusion: I talk a lot about the will of nature and Biosophy in my work, and so this piece is all about how we connect with nature as just another species of animal, though it is an illusion to see ourselves as equal to other wild animals and plant life, as of course we are too consciousness to really think we are equal to the things we slaughter and devour each day en masse. The Illusion of an egalitarian perspective, is that humanity thinks it can fully equalise all of man with the animal kingdom, and yet even that functions as a kingdom due to the reliance on a food chain and the hierarchies that keep everything in check, we are however able to abscond from a food chain and a natural hierarchy because we can contemplate and imagine a world where that doesn’t impact us, an animal and plant cannot, their primary function is survival, and if we were in their way of survival we too would not last long in the real jungle of nature. It’s often why the works of Blackwood talk about the facade of nature as docile and incompetent, and this is only a human logic because if we didn’t have our advancements and our tools as well as our intelligence, we too would be victim to the natural course of the animal kingdom. Believing that you can live in nature as one with the animals is an insult to the animal kingdom, try living like a feral beast for a year and you’d starve in weeks, taking your pre-established ideas of civility and social conditioning into the natural world and you fail everytime against the other animals who had no intervention of consciousness to be better than nature itself, they accepted their fate and role in the kingdom, we merely made our kingdom about control and currency. 

42. Judas: Out of the images of kisses and necrophilic and sadomasochist relations through portraiture, this piece is just me wanting to make something that Suehiro Maruo could enjoy, that of a depiction of Jesus and Judas caught in a illicit act, feasting on each others’ mucus and bodily fluids and the like. I often used to enjoy drawing on such references in theological stories and making satirical pieces like this, but this one is more for my own enjoyment and honestly isn’t to be taken too seriously. If you wanted to stretch for a concept here, you could argue it has something to do sexual insecurity as portrayed through religious referencing and it’s associations with prudishness and the reliance on spiritualising shame and guilt to force people into becoming sexually robotic and rigid. So in turn, why not depict the son of god in a homosexual relationship with the man who betrayed him, sort of another sadomasochist connection that is far more originally surrealist than dark or horrific per say, atleast in my opinion. 

43. War: This piece is based on this still and scene from ‘Come and See’ (1985), a war film by Elem Klimov:

Source: http://dfv363summer2012.blogspot.com/2012/07/elem-klimovs-come-and-see-1985-by-mark.html

This piece was inspired by the invasion of Ukraine during the earliest months of this project, and I couldn’t help but be frustrated by the amount of people making portraits about Putin, and even though I have stated I won’t discuss the war itself until it’s over as no party in that war has a clean record and history may repeat itself very soon either way, but I felt so many contemporary artists missed the mark. They made images on the invader and non of them captured the faces of the massacred and destroyed, I could only think of the film ‘Come and See’ as a fantastic example of how to represent war and it’s effect authentically. The lead character: Florya, as played by Aleksei Kravchenko, represents the human cost of war, as a child fighting back the worst of the German army in Belorussia he witnesses lynching, the execution of his family, the immolation of people en masse in barns and their homes, the ransacking of farms and the destruction of the countryside, rape and animal abuse. By the end of the film and with no physical representation of Hitler ever being made present to the audience, Florya having survived so much and aged in his face by what looks like decades of fighting on his still adolescent face, shoots at a portrait of Hitler as he cries into the closing scene of the film. It shows how scaring and deeply defeating it is to live through a survive a war, though you made it out, you didn’t leave with everything you had in the beginning, and Elem as a soviet director of the time knew this mindsight all too well. It often bothers me that war is about the people in power and not the soldiers or the civilians you lose their lives in the thousands, we call ourselves humanitarians, but where is the human representation when everyone is concerned with making images of Putin in clown paint? It doesn’t make sense to me personally, it honestly made me believe and see that people were clearly more interested in criticising egos, over criticising the actions on the ground and those who are actually and currently committing war crimes and taking the rights of others as I write this even now. 

44. Godwin: This piece feels like an adequate progression from the last piece, this piece being based on Godwin’s Law, in that all contemporary political conversation eventually leads to referencing and comparing things to the nazis, and the law generally proves the impact the nazis had on post-modern conversational debate, as in the age of Trump and Putin most can’t help but make pathetic comparisons to Hitler when they never experienced the threat of true nazis in their life. The threat of Nazism certainly being far more of an intellectual debate than an actual pragmatic terror in real life as most would point out to you, as even contemporary nazis aren’t even socialists and they don’t even respect the original values of the thulean perspective, of which nazis was built upon. The term ‘nazi’ and ‘fascism’ are interchangeable only now, back in the day they were not as they represented to separate, yet, allied political parties (mussolini as the head of the fascist movement, fascist coming from the latin ‘fascio’ to mean a bundle, i.e. power through collectivism as inspired by the propaganda of roman history within the fascist movement), and though yes the terms become more alike in time due to their dilution in pop culture, these times now have no power or intellectual value, they are watered down to the point of making them a quick slander that any idiot can throw out once their argument begins to fail, i.e. when criticising world leaders like Putin that people can’t be bothered to actually study and find actual reasons to hate him beyond articles read through their phone screen (It’s important to mention I’m not a fan of Putin, just the idea of calling him Hitler diminishes the brutality of Hitler and his war when you start calling everyone you disagree with or anyone who gives you conflict a nazis and a physical embodiment of Hitler, 8 million civilians didn’t die so you could moan about your mom being a Hitler to you). It’s my theory that most don’t know the true terror of national socialism or communism, and hide behind pop cultural terms without looking into their actual history and seeing just how destructive groups like these were in the 20th century, and all in the name of progress past the dogmatic religionist past of europe before these movements. Diminishing the real history of WW2 and it’s after effects is what causes history to repeat itself and causes characters like Hitler to lose their strength in teaching the next generation about the realities of human conflict and the potential we all have to destroy the very world around us, and so calling everyone out that you disagree with a nazis, by my understanding of history, that makes you the fascist for generalising so badly that you inadvertently brand a whole group of people and beliefs not worth debating or even allowed to exist, the very thing the nazis caused a world war for. But because people want to soak in their western privileges of having never lived under the threat of communist and nazis supremacy, they then think they understand what it could be like rather than actually educating themselves with the weight of merciless of evidence there is available to them, and it’s ironic in a time of immense liberalism that humanity would forget would a controlling and oppressive attitude would look like when they are happy to cancel, attack, and silence who groups of people for simply existing in what should be a secular and democratic body politic.  

45. Posterity: This piece is from the same ideas of the last, in particular, focusing on the future of discourse, especially when the immense of accessibility of information has made people dumber, and the reason why this has happened is because more information does not mean better information, or better translation and criticism, it just means more people are passing misinformation and pseudo-intellectual takes around faster than they’ve ever done. As instead of the old wives tales we grew up with, now we have fake news and outrage porn, we went from making up parables about not going out with wet hair to avoid getting colds, to believing every conservative is a nazis, and every liberal is an art college dropout with a victim complex, we have become ruled by assumptive thinking and speculative intellectualism, and yet no one is talking or seeing for themselves, god forbid anyone goes out and gets a fresh slice of life and more advanced intellectual material into their life. The posterity of discourse is looking good and people would rather live in their own bubbles than debate the uncomfortable and discuss real world history and current events as they are in the noumenal world outside of their own egos and habitual lifestyles. It all diminishes the real world impact of people’s choices and so I naturally find it so resent inducing in me to try and speak with my own generation without them making everything about politics they don’t even understand, or about celebrities with no relevance to their own ideas and ambitions in the world. It’s why I keep calling my own generation aimless and sad, stupid even, which of course makes me sound arrogant as all hell, but that’s only because I know my own worth and I know I can’t improve my own position in life without being responsible for my own development and critical thought, so many want to live collectively, and yet, blame every conflict they ever face on the nazis in power and their agents out in the public. I find this impact that comes directly from the nazis and their hold over even contemporary pop culture to be utterly fascinating, as any sociologist would too, it’s a subject to study intently with the aim to see that the nazis exist now as the archetypal villain and prove that people need a villain and scapegoat to vent at, and to use as the thing to justify their causes in life. It’s why you so often see Icons and idols as the personal enemy of an individual, rather than them looking to work on their own self-doubt and obsessive behaviours. Because if Hitler never existed we would have found another fall guy, another devil and a justification to rebel against it, that’s all we ever do, find the next bad guy and then base the rest of your life on fighting it so you don’t have to look at yourself and make introspective judgements on your own self worth and independence of though and responsibility over your actions. Of which people often forget where the same things that made Hitler into the power mad leader he was, no responsible and mature man claims millions of lives in just under a decade only to blame them for his downfall. 

46. Pauline: I made this image after years of shaving my head and adopting the lifestyle of a hermit, especially that of almost zen Buddhist hermit in particular, as they wish to completely remove themselves from vanity and material dependency, and in my travels I have even met and received a gift from a buddhist monk (I was touring temples in Thailand at the time, even saw the largest Gold Buddha too on the same day), I always thought it was due to the mutual connection of us both having a shaved head and not dressing too vain. The term for this style of avoiding vanity through a haircut being known as a ‘Pauline Tonsure’, atleast in the christian world, as St Paul was bald and saw his baldness as a virtue, due to not wanting to live a vain life always wondering about appearances and aesthetical value above all else. Though I love this mode and have done so ever since I began to truly go straight edge and sobered up back in 2019, I also see as the ambiguity of identity, as alot of people see their hair as their identity whereas I don’t. This removal from vanity makes you see just how vain the average person can be, always worrying about the smallest of hairs and the slightest grey tinges, people are often using these mechanisms to attract and distract the people around them, and thusly it becomes a dishonest form of expression by proxy, as expression should not hide or take away from your natural state, but hair can easily become a symbol of status and privilege far quicker than jewels and clothing can be as it starts from birth. Even my role model Anton Szandor LaVey shaved his head upon founding the Church of Satan for the same reasons, it’s about simpler wants and natural masculinity without some level of idealism present, it represents a life that is modest yet enjoyable due to it’s liberating feel when you are no longer weighed down by typical vanities. So it’s a universal symbolism that even the religious, agnostic and atheistic can enjoy, it gives the wearer a chance to shine on their own and without some poncy plum dancing about their forehead. 

47. Ares: This piece is inspired by this version of Mars (the Roman equivalent of Ares) by Jacob de Gheyn iii (1599):

Source: https://www.magnoliabox.com/products/mars-lc20160208-3645

I love this depiction of the god of war, because it’s so Gaullist and slobbering, very barbaric and dog like, not at all a romantic depiction of war by any means, this again being a reference to the comments made in the piece ‘War’, and that of depicting war through the actual humanity that gets caught in the crossfire. This being why I upon finding this image of Gheyn (iii), I just had to focus on it’s sad expression and make into a comment on the image of war in historical media, as in, war has always and throughout history represented a ghoulish aspect of our propensity to deal with conflict through further conflict. No artist has ever truly been able to make war look like a sport or hobby to anyone, it’s always been seen as a brutal and graphic fact of life that war is capable of happening and ruining millions upon billions of lives in the process over hundreds of thousands of years. While we can praise victory and the soldiers who died for it, as well as mourning defeat, war itself will always be recognised by the creative and the philosopher as an overall tragedy, and no better face of this concept made more sense to me than the one this portrait is based on, of which I found during the war in Ukraine and instantly I knew I had to make my version of it. 

48. Janus: This piece is not inspired by the original deity of the same name, but his adaptation in the writings of Thacker to represent the uncanny and the paradoxical. The idea of the two faced yet one headed god and image of a living paradox is one that fascinates figures like Eugene Thacker and Thomas Ligotti to no end, as it represents the very borders between familiarity and the potential for the surreal and abstract as made all the more important when trying to study and understand the uncanny, as the as of yet unimagined and imagined together as one entity and atmosphere within philosophical conversation on the testing of the boundaries between the metaphysical and meontological. 

49. Stoic: Mark Manson wrote on stoicism that is a path to sociopathy, that being completely indifferent to your emotions and the effect they have on your everyday life makes you naturally more inhuman and cold, it makes you into the worst person at any given party, and human connectivity relies too much on emotional exchange and physical comfort around others, not being the one stone on the shore against the naturally crashing waves of humanity in motion. It’s for this reason why Nietzsche hated stoicism so much, he saw it as mask of which all logic and reason was bound to in the history of dogmatic philosophical discourse, as while the stoics would tell you to control your emotions and actions to best mature yourself, that would also seek to have a reason behind any and everything that would present even the smallest conflict in their life, not allowing their emotions to respond. It’s why you see no artists loved for the radical stoicism in the historical or contemporary discourse, they just make for some of the worst creative thinkers and can’t express anything without absolute logic needing to present at all times. It’s why I see stoicism as a mask, the representation in this piece even being based on the typical visage of greek and roman heroes, of which were chiselled into stone, becoming later the quintessential image of stoic philosophy as emblemised by the analogue of the emotional fortitude found in stone as an artistic medium. The idea that a person can be completely emotionless or control their emotions to the point of numbing their natural responses and reactions is not something to be proud of, but it’s role in post modern society only makes sense as a way of curbing the temptations of outrage culture and nothing else, living life behind a mask that hides any and all overt expression and natural exchange is often the key symptom of psychopathy and sociopathy for a good reason. It takes allowing yourself to express and speak openly on your own experiences and view of the to teach and connect with others, but some will always see an expressionless mask as the only protective tool they have against the inauthenticity of western civilization and it’s people, something that has not gotten better since the days of early cynicism and Diogenes, of which actually influenced both pessimistic philosophy and stoicism in the wake of Diogenes’ death. 

50. Bacon: This image is based on this Francis Bacon painting (Study for a Portrait, 1953):

Source: https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/study-portrait-3

It’s obvious enough just how much I love the works of Francis Bacon, and if I had allowed myself more time to research via quotation I would have written up even more notes about his ideas on ultra-violence and truth with in art too alongside the notes on Manson and Ligotti, but the one take away here is that I still wanted to represent my affinity for Bacon and his work from the 1950s in particular, as this is my favourite period of his practice due to how dark and atmospheric all the pieces are. Bacon’s work in the 1950s and the earlier stages of his public career are less about the use of colour or shape, and are instead so much more about the presence of existence in space and it’s dynamism against shadow and light, with most of his portraits looking almost unfinished or intentionally empty, and all of this is on purpose to focus on the figure in space and how they punctuate a scene, something that Bacon’s history as an interior designer makes all the more relevant. You see this portrait in particular makes me think best on where we link together stylistically, he in attempt to represent people and their relation to space authentically, does so by drawing and painting the figure expressively and without overworking the details that make the subject factual human, and in turn this allows the audience and their brains to make up the rest on the spot, it’s almost an optical illusion that both makes you want to look for the smaller details that build up this image, and to look at it at a distance to see how your brain smudges everything into a coherent image once you stop overthinking it. And my work attempts to operate on this same basis, though of course more conceptually and in the key idea behind the work as represented through achromatic surrealism, with an emphasis on presenting the viewer with a deeply expressive piece and without giving too much away. This can breed misunderstanding as Bacon didn’t want his work to be seen as works of horror or terror even though most assume they are, and mine are attempts at horror and dark surrealism yet it can still be misunderstood and seen as lesser art for those associations compared to the brilliance and nuance of Bacon’s works. In summary, this portrait is about that conflict between space and our negotiations through it, through portraiture as best discussed in the works of Bacon in his more achromatic days of earlier painting etc. 

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

The 63, Part 4:

31. Entropy: This image is based somewhat on images of people wearing protective visors or protective goggles when looking into an eclipse or into a site of immense radiation and nuclear fallout. And even though the original image is unfortunately lost again, the message remains the same, in that my piece is about criticising humanity’s ability to stare into the abyss and the will of nature with this level of hubris and self-inflated confidence against it as if we could ever study it without thusly finding why we should be afraid of it’s eventual destruction of us, as entropy as an argument in cellular existence and the collapse of an object in physics is most certainly an analogy of how we too will one day lose against nature. And it doesn’t matter the advancements we make, the toils in the sciences and industry, both philosophically and practically, nature will always reclaim and recycle us, the will of nature and entropy as it’s horseman are always present and never away from the time of collecting their debt, as what comes up...must come down. Entropy scares most and leaves them wanting to focus on the next immortality project or legacy of the future that they believe will keep them from dying a mortal fate or to do die too quickly without being able to marked in the history books. The fear of entropy is not just a fear of death and chaos though, it is a fear of life and it’s inherent processes, of which we can never totally deflect, nor can we ever control and exploit for our benefit, after all, once humanity eats its way into oblivion, nature will retake it’s throne and wash the slate clean long after we are but ashes and the dust of a civilisation that was too afraid of nature to learn from it and take its warnings voluntarily. This of course can become a conversation on environmentalist / exctinctionist ideas on nature, but as that is not my field I will admit it’s influence on this work and allow the audience to debate that for me based on what I’ve already suggested in these notes. 

32. Comedian: This image is based on the Schopenhauer quote: 

“The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasised, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy”

This in tandem with the Alan Moore character ‘The Comedian’ as featured in the graphic novel ‘Watchmen’ (1985), whose main philosophy in life is that if all life and meaning is a joke, then be a comedian. It often to me represents the idea that you can only really laugh about nihilism and pessimistic ideas on life when you fully resign yourself from the pressures of conventional society to be painfully optimistic all the time, once you relieve yourself of that pressure you see the world and all it’s people as it really is, a joke. Most people run around with two faces and forget the self-aware one they left in the car before going out to partake in the rat race. It’s not that I see every person I meet and have a connection with as a punch line to the joke that is dogmatic society, it’s more the idea that living to make the cut of your ideals and to live by everyone else’s standards and views of the world just makes you a far unhappier person, whereas learning to live with nihilism and have your own fun with it you really get to enjoy life and enjoy yourself as a product of nature and not some manmade catholic conspiracy. It does of course mean that I attempt to live a Zen Buddhist-esque lifestyle, because it has worked for thousands of years for buddhist countries and honestly who wouldn’t want to live a life of ease and lacking vanity, it sounds rudimentary but to the point of allowing you to enjoy your own bodily experiences and to allow yourself to have an actual sense of humour, as it’s often those who are most conventional and ruled by facades and ideals of the world that typically have the most defensive and regressive attitudes, almost as if the idea of nothing mattering being a personal insult to them, for me it’s a reason not to care about shame, embarrassment and the general pressures of  being a standard citizen of civility, frankly it’s why I see myself as so hermetic compared to my peers. I have no issue with people wanting to make the world a more peaceful place, but you can’t do that by replacing one dogma with another, that’s just derivative and done for the sake of being in history books not because they actually care about helping humanity overcome hardship.   

33. Judy: This piece is inspired by this photograph:

Source: https://hintmag.com/2016/05/31/post-judy-blame-exhibition-may-31-2016-1506/

This piece was about taking the unorthodox style tips and abstract profiles of Judy and making them all the more physical and illustrated beyond the limitations of the average human face, almost representing the potential when looking beyond the rigid and generic, something of which people like Judy and Rick Owens are renowned. And so naturally both inspire me to think about abstraction as a post-modern fashion as well as being a philosophy and academic study within my practice and that of other dark surrealists.

34. Mahomet: This piece will be divisive and it’s the only piece that concerns about people seeing, only because it’s technically a depiction of the prophet Muhammad and is based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, and how he frames the Prophet Muhammad as the emblem of schism within the darker realms of hell, the schismatics being dissecting and mutilated in hell for the divisiveness they represented in life, and while I don’t have an immense with Islam, I do believe that if you’re going to criticise one religion then there can no room for double standards. This piece being more representative on the issue of schism in of itself though, that we live in one of the most conflicted times politically, ethically and media wise, everything is just so contradictory, objective versus objective without compromise, and everyone thinks their opinion holds the same amount of weight as authors who have decades of experience against them. For a time of immense connectiveness and academic accessibility people are far more excited by division and equity, rather than equality of opportunity and equal rights without double standard. You don’t have to look far to see factionalism at it’s peak in slackivists groups other social media and even in your very own families, it’s no wonder people like Jordan Peterson are using terms like ‘Culture War’ and ‘The Generation of Outrage’ when talking about the current political and social conflicts happening all around us, even the discussion of Islam in the west makes for quite some fascinating dialogues that are still being debated and will continue to be debated long after I’m dead, as these conflicts over division and difference of opinion to difference of lifestyle and how these things intersect in the real world is so much more of a common philosophical conversation on the body politic now, way more so than ever due to the stream of arguments you see being pumped out by the twitter sphere and sold by the press by the tonne. It’s very troubling seeing all these lost people arguing over whose going in the right direction, when even they can’t prophesies the future themselves, there’s too many arguments and not enough diplomatic comprises and lessons being made on how to conduct civil debate without tensions rising, another reason why I believe humanity will eventually cannibalise itself all for the sake of outliving and out consuming the competition out of purest resentment and the hunger for outrage to fuel the progression of the mundane everyday. 

35. Prism: Quoting myself from Robert Walters again: 

“This piece is more generally inspired by contemporary post-modern negotiations on meaning and orientation within the universe and existentialism. In so far that human logic can only go so far before it hits a wall of confusion and looks to make shapes out of abhuman and inherently meaningless ideas. Something that naturally inspires dark surrealists and weird fiction authors, as we challenge the idea that we are the authorities of the universe, especially after such thematics as the post Copernican-turn in the sciences. And we can only go so far before we start making assumptions about questions that are far too complicated for anyone to claim the absolute answer over objectively, such on the depths of the universe and just lonely we are in it. As featured and discussed in my current project 'Noumena'.”

Thusly this piece is more about the ideas discussed in the main mind maps of this project, that of John Dee and occult geometry with his Enochian Keys, and prisms as the gateway to hell and the great abyss beyond our world, which in of itself is not a ridiculous idea in of itself, ever since humans have found crystals and found ways to chisel them people have always seen them as occult artefacts that are capable of expanding the minds eye into another dimension, even the iconic subject of Isaac Newton’s studies into the spectrum of colour through as actualised through projecting light into a prism and was primarily measured through a series of prisms which displayed the fractions of colour between the darker and brightest elements through natural light, it’s no wonder we see natural things as keys to greater ideas beyond our own intuitions of the universe and it’s formulation etc. 

36. Hysteria: Most people know hysteria and have even experienced it within themselves, it once even being seen as a woman’s problem that could be cured by masturbation, such different times but the idea shouldn’t really shock you much, everyone is capable of panic, being overwhelmed, and having to wear a face of calmness while the world around them seems as if its crumbling, and we humans are the best at panicking over literally anything, especially so in these times of immense paranoia and anxiety. It’s no wonder to me that people want to scream and shout in these days of manic depression and chaotic interpersonal connectivity in the Anthropocene, if the western world wasn’t so prudish I’m sure most would see screaming and masturbating to cure hysteria as well respected treatment to living in a terminally kafka-esque world of bureaucracy and existential dread over the slightest infractions, I almost wish people would be more overt in dealing with their hysteria rather than using it as a tool for collectivist mob rule through social media outrage and 2 minutes of hate you see when anyone’s mask of civility slips from its hinges. It’s certainly a fact that outrage porn and the age of outrage are real problems nowadays, but that’s only because people don’t know how to express themselves and how to vent mental tension, after all, we may be more connected but that also means people’s lives are more transparent and so others judge them so much more into a repressive corner of their mind, collectivism really stops people from being individuals and letting loose, it’s why Japan as a fitting example has one of the worst productivity rates and why people don’t want to stand out, they live to accept conformity so as to save being picked off like a marked zebra that is always targeted by the lion for standing out, this repressed attitude makes more murderers and rapists of normal men and women, as it only takes one fuse to ignite a live and pressure filled grenade. In short, people either need to wank more or resign from society and it’s collectivist pressures or they’re going to be on the news for breaking loose a little too terroristically, sounds quite funny though I guess. 

37. Hyena: This piece is a side tribute to my old alias Hyena the Hermit (2018 - 2020), the more comical and satirical alias I used to have long before Deoffal even became a consistent thought in my mind. This piece is more a nod and wink to my old self, showing them where I am now and thanking them for having been a force that pushed me into doing what I do now as Hyena really did lay the ground work and was my alias through a challenging time in my life (from the transition to BA student to MA student, all while working through covid and getting through the harder days of having a relationship during the long lockdowns of the previous years).

38. Nepotism: A pessimistic argument against procreation and natalist attitudes is that when you realise you are having children for the sake of having a legacy, and thusly trying to avoid death by having a lineage of your genes, is it then right to have children knowing that you’re having them for the sake of a convention, and not because you genuinely wish to be a parent and guardian of the next generation? All too often do we see celebrities and monarchies likewise raising their children to be their stand in, or to be their eventual caregiver once their spotlight fades, it shouldn’t be the job of your children to be your double, nor to be conditioned into believing that collectivist pride over individual merit and integrity is worth even considering, I’m lucky enough to have parents who support and push me into doing what I do best and to get a career off of my own hardwork, but when I see cases of famous artists have famous children and premade careers and funding guiding them through life it makes me realise why I do what I do, to be better than the upper classes you think they can own the scene just because these upper families fund the institutions, but it’s a double edged sword, but proving them wrong can lead you down the same path unless you keep your kids from getting spoilt and wanting to inherent your success after your gone. I guess this resentment of successful families is so much more informed by my opinions on the monarchy and our queen, well she isn’t my queen for a start, and the sooner their inbred asses are out of the seat of power I know my country will finally be free and able to progress into the future. 

39. Cell: This piece is way more on the nose when it comes to my comments on mitochondrial existentialism, as this is my reimaging of a cell of some kind made into a profile study and of course a portraiture, not too dissimilar to the bacterial studies and figurative art of Ernst Haeckel, someone I am beginning to study in my spare time, his work will certainly become invaluable to me soon once I write more about mitochondrial existentialism in my PhD thesis, as that is quite literally what biologists, genealogists and darwinists all talk and illustrate about in their work, something I am looking to deepen my ideas on all the time due to the amount of interest in my biology and science that my work seems to be showing the longer I deepen my research and taste in authors that only add to my current ideas and practice direction.

40. Soup: This piece is somewhat of a redrawing on this image from Soma:

Both pieces seek to give the preconscious, the space between the conscious and subconscious (often overlooking in theory nowadays due to even Freud saying his idea of the preconscious was more a study of the layers of the subconscious rather than states of consciousness altogether), in this space between the imaginative and reality it is possible for the brain to mix and play on the faculties of the two, making soupy inconsistent and uncanny images of reality and the imagined by the subconscious, it’s often way I say my brain is so soupy, because I recognise that my preconscious plays on abstract values to point of helping me make such automatic images as this which tow the line between the as of yet unimagined and the soon to be recognisable in my mind’s eye, it’s why the uncanny is often spoken of in the same sense and with the same language, as our brain is always playing with illusions and constantly trying to format lived and yet to be lived experiences into memories and expectations of the future, it shows just how strange the brain can be when attempting to interpret and create new images. 

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

Recent contact from Kaleido (and their plans for a Birmingham collection on their site)

I recently received this email due to me being one of the first Birmingham artists on their site, and because their only a small website now, they want to expand and establish themselves as the compendium of current artists, as made all the more valuable by housing us in our respective collection as based on our places of natural patriotism, i.e. where we operate and where our work is based, I may pass this onto Mona and other tutors at the school of art soon enough, but it’s good to feel involved in the future of a platform and who knows where Kaleido as a future social media influence will be in the next decade, especially if I can use this level of contact confidence to help other artists help grow the platform. 

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Recognition from the IKON

Though I won’t make notes on the private view altogether as it won’t effect my marks, and generally speaking, audience feedback as seen on the evening and in my invigilation spots, people have really enjoyed my installation and people now want pick my brain all the more than they did before, in particular, I was lucky enough to have gotten a shout-out by the visiting IKON staff (I apologise for not remembering their names or their position in the IKON, the shock consumed my memory as I never win anything, certainly not from institutions as local and critical enough to me as a Birmingham art student), they want to arrange a meeting and discuss my future, which both sounds like a daunting interview for my early career, and also the greatest way to throw myself in at the deep end and push myself into the professional all the more. All of this atleast proves that horror art clearly can be held to the standard of high art as was one of my original questions, it’s odd to see this question answered by the staff of an institution beyond my control but it still proves the end justifying the means if this is the feedback that I’m currently getting, so you knows what’ll happen the more I get myself and my work about the zeitgeist.

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An update on contacting Junji Ito.

In short, there’s no proper way to contact him and his team which is fair enough, unlike Eugene Thacker, there is no way of getting access to even those who market his work as an inbetween, and it after hours and days of looking to find feasible contact info to make him aware of his influence on my work I’m going to have to stop and make my work stand out the old fashioned way, by working hard enough to make my work as public as possible so as to attract his attention when I have more worked up affluence in the future. But for now, I’ll unfortunate have to settle for working my way up to get the attention I so desire, not for the sake of money or fame, but only so one of my greatest inspirations can see the fruit of their legacy, that’s all I really want and I know If I work hard enough this should be one day achieveable, to just have him aware of my work would be enough. 

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The 63, Part 3:

21. Clean: This image is simple enough, it represents the typical reaction of us to cover and distract ourselves from the ugly and unethical, almost as if to throw an opaque and temporal film over the very things that haunt and discomfort us, thusly expecting for such a sublimation to stop us from having to confront the concept for longer, almost as if to put a sheet over the traumatic and alternative, the subject here being a demon of some kind, its horns glazed in a sheet and holes where it’s persistence has made light work of it’s soft prison, now only teasing the audience with what can expected to reveal its full visage soon enough. 

22. Depraved: This piece is more of a statement on the practice, as my work is depraved portraiture, I take the human model and I refuse it’s pleasantries to me, I reimagine the face and the intention of it becomes so much more abstract and conceptual, but corruption becomes a conflated term with entropy, as entropy and corruption have one goal in mind, to let nature and natural processes do their worst, and for artists and art this is a tool to test the boundaries of where the familiar and the provocative begin and end as they intersect each other. That’s why this piece is such an Ersntian collage of ideas and motifs, it’s both preternatural and mundane, as seen in the contrast between the fullness of the cheeks compared to the split of the jaw and the egregiousness of the eyes. 

23. Schizo: Mental illness runs rampant in my family, might as well get that comment out of the way, I even thought I was psychotic for a long time as I do hallucinate and of course go through manic episodes commonly enough that it clearly isn’t normal for someone as straight edge as me. My grandfather was schizophrenic and lived the majority of his life on medication, but I can’t help but think, with the amount of creative types and overt personalities in my family, maybe we’re all off the kilter by default, and an example of genetics and neurology having it’s own experiment, it often makes me think that those who are psychotic and neurotic are maybe seeing things that others can’t because they can communicate with and experience the noumenal world, who would be able to say that I’m wrong in that inference, we already know that our eyes are illusionary in their perception of light and reflection, look into an mirror and test it, mirrors don’t operate as reflective surfaces for you, they are reflective because we can’t see what they actually look like because of how our eyes refract light in any given space, it’s why you can see parts of your body in a mirror that aren’t facing the mirror, your eyes give a mirror it’s value, not the other way round. I’m just rambling, but it’s no wonder that most assume soothsayers and prophets were mostly schizophrenic or tripping balls when they made their beliefs public knowledge, whose to say that isn’t a connection between the world as we know it and the world as it really is?

24. Wise: This piece mirrors ‘Civil’ in alot of ways, but speaks so much more so on the idealism of aging gracefully with the growth of your intellect as presented most often in the old and typical image of the role model figure as almost being like a parent or grand parent to you etc. Long ears again being a typical motif of mine, resembling the idea of elephants and their fantastic memory, and naturally the fact that the elderly prove their fight with gravity the more their body sags and hangs off of their bones. This image still be seen as quite creatively creepy to some, but its concept is that having an intellect and growing up to be wise may leave you feeling and looking alien to everyone else, I’m still very young and yet even I feel this starting to set in the more I mature through my studies, you begin to feel your wisdom and intellect making you into a more mature and aesthetically abnormal person and that’s only going to become more confident the older and get and the more educated I become. After all, there’s a level of eccentricity in keeping the brain sharp to live longer and to stop yourself from going senile, it’s something I quite admire in the Christopher Lee and Patrick Stewart types, but they show their age with their ears, their eyes and their noses amongst other things, this piece is not inspired by anyone outright, but could be said to be a rumination on the image of buddha in south Asian culture, what with the resting face, the short hair and lacking vanity. 

25. Block: This piece was inspired by this piece done for Soma Volume 1:

The art that inspired this new piece was so much more about chiselling away at the mental clot that comes from working too hard to be creative all the time, something most experience on the daily due to the inherent pressures of being an artist. However, this recent piece is alot more about wearing this with pride, making yourself into one of the echo chamber and making that the way to overcome artist pressure, as nowadays I am so much more automatic and have made atleast 200 different pieces for this project alone, which is such an achievement compared to the 108 I made for Soma. But overall, I am happier with my more blocked off and narrow attitude, it makes more of an independent specialist type and shields me from the constant bombardment of my peers wanting me to diversify all the time, my stubbornness to work in one field and to produce work constantly means that I am so much more solitary, but my area of expertise is now so much more insular and detailed, which can only really be the result of all the guidance I have received over the years to knuckle down and really work hard on my own chosen field to become the best at it. Furthermore, and even though I am certainly still not the best at it yet, I feel really proud of my work ethics over the last two years, as now I have my own style and practice where mimicry or imitation of idols of mine is a far smaller and insignificant issue, as I am making tonnes of work each new project and I will soon overtake Picasso and Van Gogh for the most amount of art made in a lifetime, while hopefully still following the model of “specialising and producing on volume leads to quality and greater control and expertise as a practitioner”. There are still holes in my armour though, as I now inspiration can still found everywhere and with every conversation, I’m just much happier being a representative of my field, who knows what he’s talking about and knows how to produce consistently against the more open peers I have who in turn struggle to finish one smaller collection of work, but that’s just based on my experience of other artists and art students of course. In short, I hate masters of nothing and so I’m going to do my best to avoid that title at all costs, unless it’s said in a way that’s humorous, as I do literally study nihilism and so technically I do study nothing by proxy. 

26. Shoggoth: As a opposed to pieces based off of Ted from ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’, a Shoggoth as written by Lovecraft is a sentient mess of flesh and appendages, a living example of how perverse form and definitive shape can be played with. The Shoggoth as a species of beast appears in most stories of Lovecraft’s, simply because they are filler for the greater creatures in his stories, but they’re always framed as being so shocking to spot that the make the viewer immediately traumatise from seeing their gelatinous human/ animal hybridity, the almost act as the anti-alien in science fiction, they are be no means the stylistic Greys and Amazonia blue faced maidens of the 1960s and 70s, they represent the potential for a perverted sense of imagination to make all manner of bastards of consciousness and it’s propensity to be manipulated by horror’s influence, something Lovecraft was a master of exploiting and is still recognised as being on of those who pioneered this style post-gothic horror literature over a century ago. 

27. Iron: I based this work off my interest of the story ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ by Alexander Dumas (1850), the folklore of the story in of itself fascinates me, the idea of man made famous for not having an identity and being fiercely hidden from the world for his own safety, as well as for the safety of those who witness his real face, it sounds like the phantom of the opera but without the horror overtones and murder. But it reminds me as to why I cover my face and keep my identity as mysterious as I can, it’s a paradoxical thematic, people aren’t interested in the faces of nobodies, but, they are fascinated with the mystery of a masked nobody, being a nobody then becomes a case of immense speculation and excitement for many, almost teasing the imaginative part of their brain, like a lingerie for the soul, it teases the audience in a way that gets them exciting to figure out the real identity of the person, while at the same time being ruined for them once the face is revealed, it’s a play on expectation versus reality and reality as it is and so forth, and given my work is all about those themes I too have to represent those ideas in the way I present myself. 

28. Fluid: I’ve used this a tonne of times now in competitions, its a good example of my plays on form within the idea of the noumena as said a thousand times at this point, and though people may relate it to gender studies and queer art by the title, it has intention affiliation, and though I find the works of people like Genesis P-Orridge utterly fascinating (and I have currently been revising their work for my PhD research due to their idea on pandrogeny and the limits of material form etc), this work is about the states of matter again, both conceptually and literally, as the title is a moment on the second state of matter, and the state of matter altogether as something that is not entirely fixed or exact in it’s shape and composite values, the idea that fluid as a term in philosophical discourse has always meant to represent a flow and temporality within being and orientation, and so this piece seeks to represent those timeless ideas through portraiture, the skull as the solid, the flesh as the literal fluid and the surrounding atmosphere as the vapour and gas. 

29. Somni: I have a very off relationship with sleep, nightmares and fits of panic when I rest are common enough that my partner sometimes thinks I’m having night terrors when she can hear me scream or ramble in my sleep. Many would blame my reading, research interests and the type of media I absorb, but I would say that it’s simply because my consciousness is too aware of everything and my imagination is far too creative, after all, I dream of immensely irrational things and have deeply irrational fears, most people think my fears are the oddest thing they could ever hear from someone as deep as me into the subjects I study, the always expect it to be something more believable like death or being stalked, but even though my fears of irrational and neurotic things are deeply strange they can leave me sweating and breathing with utter panic, that’s why you’ll never find out what it is, but I know your curious either way, I am the human embodiment of a Lovecraft protagonist being traumatised by something beyond logical comprehension.

30. Tinnitus: Tinnitus as a generational problem seems to be proving itself more and more by the year, as more and more people listen to loud music, spend their working life in busy cities and around busy people, their ears are going to hold them accountable soon enough. Upon hearing of what causes tinnitus and what it does for the rest of your life, I began to ration any all kinds of sound, preferring now to wear noise cancelling headphones were I can. Just the idea of perpetual ringing, when you wake up, when you try to sleep, we you try to talk and generally live your life around other people, it sounds like a suicidal nightmare that I would never want to come anywhere close to experiencing, just the idea of my own body torturing me sounds like the worst condition to live with, especially when there’s no cure and there’s no real way to treat it for the rest of your life, what a terrifying idea to dream of. 

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The 63, Part 2:

11. Divine: A common thread in my research on the inspirations of Thacker was finding myself seeing so many debaters and researchers on the theological, from John of the Cross, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Thomas Aquinas and Robert Fludd, though Fludd was far more of reformist of theological ideas in his time, they regardless all share one idea in common, that the divine and experiencing the divine is not so easy to describe and explain, god can still be understood deeply by these authors, but the divine as an atmosphere and study on the phenomena of the divine is far muddier and always comes down to arguing between what is to be considered experience of the divine and how would one even know they were considering the divine if god is all and nothing? These questions on the metaphysics and the eventual semantics on the divine that come from going down that rabbit hole are fascinating to me, the idea that someone could experience a physical connection with the noumenal and be in the presence of experience beyond the body is not something to tread over lightly as a subject all within itself when discussing the divine beyond mere concept. It can sound like either the greatest adventure into finding abhuman euphoria, or a conversation on complete and guttural existential dread in theory, but I won’t further ramble on this as it’ll just get too complicated for a couple notes on a blog post.

12. Sam: This image is based on this image of the Rick Owens model Sam Colette:

Source: https://twitter.com/rickowensonline/status/1160940082276249601

My version is of course more mutative and the inverse of Sam's actual appearance, seeking instead to take the shimmer of light and make them into dimples and holes in the face, this image and ‘Tyrone’ (another model of Owen’s portfolio) as well as all the other fashion icons referenced in my work all refer back to the same notes featured on the piece ‘Masc’, just something about alternative representation in contemporary fashion excites my imagination really and can’t explain it deeper than that without over analysing something that I study out of joy rather than for academic purposes entirely. 

13. Tyrone: The original image that inspired this piece is currently missing from all my collections and so accept instead a short summary of this piece’s original inspiration, this piece was inspired by a headshot Rick Owens model Tyrone Susman, and due to his long hair obscuring his face, I thought to again invert the image and have the hair represent the hollowness of vanity, the sprouting bud as representative as the potential when attempting to represent introspective ideas on the human image and expression etc. All the pieces in this 10 are more caricaturist than most over collections in the 63, only because I must have been taking alot of interest in subversion and explicit surreal themes at the time of drawing these, who knows? All I know is my phone is bricked with references of alternative models and fashion for inspiration, and of course I happen to lose one reference in the pile, reminds me to organise my references for the next collection of works. 

14. Unclowny: This image is based on someone I have followed for quite a while on IG now, going by Unclowny Resemblance:

 https://www.instagram.com/unclowny_resembalancee/

Their work is of constant inspiration to me due to how immensely odd and camp it is, but I chose to draw them in particular, as they seem to follow in the steps of Leigh Bowery and Judy Blame, with their own style being traditionally masculine enough, and yet constantly toyed and experimented with in the efforts of creating all kinds of fresh and exciting faces, it just always sends me into a drawing fir seeing their work on a regular basis.

15. Leigh: Leigh Bowery is arguable the most underground fashion figure you could think of, who was also able to infiltrate high art by becoming a muse of Lucian Freud, infiltrate and revolutionise contemporary mainstream trends all in the same life, he was the embodiment of self-metamorphosis and towed the line between the uncanny and the depraved more often than not, it’s not wonder we still see an immense amount of love for him in the alternative fashion scene, and contemporary drag culture and performance art, as well as the aesthetics of Rick Owens, just would all not exist if it were not the trail blazers like Bowery who pushed the dim forward with every new transhumanist look.

16. Gavin: This image is a caricature of Gavin Turk, I saw him popping up on my feed quite regularly and so his little beady eyes and bulbous head seemed fit for caricaturing, I have nothing malefic to say about him or his art, I just drew him like this because I had been revising Hogarth at the time and was in the mood to make a constant appearance into one I could warp and play with in my own practice, may send this to him soon too, see what he thinks of contemporary artists like me after the YBA generation had their time in the sun. 

17. Beard: This is another subversion of a Gavin Turk image, when he was photographed with a monstrous beard, I lost the reference again so that’s why it isn’t featured here. It’s just another surrealist collage of motifs to make abnormal version of the original, which was only a profile shot of Gavin with a huge beard is all, it shows my imaginative ability to make something this ridiculous and ornate from something that would typically bore the braincells out of your head. 

18. Junk: In a more serious tone now, I find myself becoming more of a luddite the older I get, but I have to be a double agent for the sake of my career to exploit the strings of contemporary digital media just to be featured and to have my work shown, otherwise I always find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the Unabomber's ideas on accelerationism and the eventual downfall of humanity coming from a dependency on technological advancement over re-establishing man’s connection with nature and a naturalist view of life altogether, I see most appliances as junk and unnecessary, physical property and actual connections between people will always be more important to me than relying on streamlined and digital ideas of how to operate your own life, but I won’t get in the way of those who do, because when the chips are down it’ll be them to go first and their disciplines built on sand will wash with the current, either learn to live naturally or die a husk of the animal nature made you to be, that’s always been the opinion of satanists. And even though technology can be tempting and represent a world without suffering, no one really wants a utopia, they just don’t want to be hassled by other people and yet want all the attention they can stomach to feel special, and in a utopia of pure technological dependency there would be chaos in minutes of its construction being finished. As people like Epicurus always argued, you need to learn from pain and independent action and consequence to grow and mature as an individual, dependency on anything, especially technology, is just another gilded cage that’ll imprison you so long as you don’t learn how to live without it. This is already a topic that is being debated to death and I’m sure that won’t change for the next thousand years, it is after all the new world religion as argued by Heidegger, as the result of a godless world framed by Nietzsche, meaning we outlived god and now we have a new cultural supremacy and dependency over the horizon. 

19. Ache: This piece is more overtly about masochism and the experience pain as visualised by a thumb being filled with tacks, or atleast a thumbish looking face and neck, I drew this to make something quite Baconian, something is purely about pain in a literal and most obvious sense of fact. 

20. Chelsea Girl: This is probably one of the only joke works that I made, bar drawing Gavin Turk as a wormish bulb, it’s based on the stereotype of Chelsea women having horse mouths and talking like their chewing on their own teeth, I think it’s enough of a reference to my own culture and country that it would look  like just the average Trevor Henderson-esque cryptid to foreign audience. Only to typically be accompanied by some fluff backstory to add atmosphere to the goofy looking face if I were to do it myself though, reminding me thusly of all the hype years ago for slender man, the entity that started this whole craze of analogue horror in contemporary horror media, and even he was just a goofy allegory for creepy men in suits who hide in the woods, hardly the scariest thing I could think of sticking in the woods to scare children, I’m sure a cryptid of jimmy Saville would be better but that’s probably just my sense of humour talking now. 

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The 63, Part 1:

1. Island: This piece is inspired by John Donne’s book ‘No Man is an Island’ (1624), wherein he discusses the fact that no man is truly alone in his existence and is apart of the zeitgeist no matter his internal feelings instead, though most want to believe they are islands and of their own character, it’s clear that you can still be an individual in life but you can’t argue that you are completely disconnected from the world and it’s effect on you, even hermits are a part of the cultured world as they chose to leave it due to the previous influence it had over them. The values of the book speak to the strains of connectivity and being an individual in a world that thrives on natural and inevitable connection with the world and it’s people, being an island is as much of an ideal as it is a defence mechanism to see yourself as such, to believe you are your own without any strings attached, as if free will wins over all when it is but an illusion. Your connection or lack their of with the world and your relationship with or against it, all inform you character and environmentally shape you into who are, there is no such thing as someone who has come from no influence or presupposed meaning and connectivity as we all have parents and a habitual developmental cycle that is active from our natalist days to our adulthood and later death etc. 

2. Close-Up: I think it’s normal now to imagine everyone knows of and watches a fair bit of porn, so people are used to imagery like this, the egregiousness of gang bangs and bukkakes, the ever flowing releases of more and more threesomes and public displays of hedonism, the overall cannibalism and consumption of carnal media and people for the sake of addictive entertainment and instant gratification is quite the concern among contemporary psychologists, and with population collapses happening throughout the world it’s no wonder to me why they exist, we are self cannibalising through masturbation. People don’t want to breed or form lasting connections if they can be gratified in hours instead of decades, and so comes a generation of libertinage that is fit to consume the world in a cannibalistic holocaust through hedonistic excess, Sade would be proud. 

3. Mycelium: Another piece ruminating on natural connectivity and the connections between us and fungus in particular as a greater connotation of just how animalistic and natural we, no matter our grander ideas on the divine and mystical. 

4. Evolution: As evolution is collection of mutations within any given genus, it is to be understood that humanity is still evolving, and will continue to change beyond what we recognise now as being a human, most joke and say we’ll grow gills or another set of fingers to become more adaptable to climate change and the extreme weather to follow, but I see evolution as also having it’s natural end in introducing the post-human species to come after us, after all, who’s to say we are the peak of evolution? And if so then surely there will one day be a downward spiral and humanity will regress back to nature? No form of medical intervention or wonder pill will be able to reinvent genetic coding all together as it’s ingrained in being human to be a complicated cross section of natural components all competing with each other to keep your body alive, but there will always be ways for entropy to do it’s job, and for the will of nature to win it’s battle against the living, who’s to say that we’ll even be around to be the top natural predator in a thousand years even? We might have cannibalised each other into oblivion by then, go the ways of the Neanderthal maybe, after all, not all viruses and diseases can be wiped off the face of the earth unless you atomically clean the planet of all imperfections. 

5. Euphoria: I don’t often feel euphoric, but when I do it feels like the sweetest emptiness I can ever imagine, no anxiety, no stress or unwarranted thoughts, just living in pure phenomenology, which isn’t always triggered by an orgasm as that can be very fleeting, but due to how I experience manic depression, it can be triggered by great music and letting go in the moment, being completely sober in that moment by the way. I have only experienced this a couple times at the peak of my mania, as it’s potential to leave me feeling floaty and objectively out of my mind is still very uncommon at this stage of my life, but I’m working to see what triggers it so how I can learn more from this natural and seductive high. 

6. Noumena: This piece represents the main theme of this whole project and my current research focus overall as the title would suggest. The very point of theses star like shapes in the hollowness of the human mind is that they represent our ability to find light in the unending darkness of the noumenal world, always looking for revelations and absolutes in nothingness, it’s often why when trying to speak on the noumenal one sound almost schizophrenic and insane discussing the idea of things beyond the imagined as established as not being entirely impossible when you think beyond mankind’s superiority complexes in theory and the sciences all together, the noumenal is very exciting to debate and study because it paradoxically exists as the objective line between the limits of our comprehension, and so in turn it doesn’t actually have an objective limit in of itself, which is why authors like Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thacker and Lovecraft have all enjoyed studying and writing whole collections of work about a world beyond explicit reason and pure logic. 

7. Sublime: Quoting myself from Robert Walters again: 

“This piece is inspired by Immanuel Kant's meditations on the sublime In his book 'Critique of Judgment' (1790). Wherein Kant discusses that the sublime is the mental experience of things greater than natural beauty and outright experience, things that exist between the phenomenal and noumenal and yet still engage with us on a subconscious level. This inspired me as it proves the potential of  philosophers or artists to take the minds of all mankind to a place beyond the physical and dogmatic. As featured in my current project 'Noumena'.”

This being again a piece that is featured alot in my current competitions and used in the promotional material of the current exhibition with the cover of Volume 2 of Noumena. This piece really represents how I am attempting to test the framing of portraiture on the whole, rather than just making it all about a face or explicitly recognisable meme of what people expect with portraiture. In short, me trying to be as post-modern as I can in the odd instance of portraiture such as this.

8. Widow: This piece is a reimaging of how I once drew Arachne for Soma - Volume 1:

I’ve always found myself coming back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, it’s such an amazing collection of animalisms in mythology, something that Lautreamontism and the majority of original surrealism is based off of, this obsession with having humanity represent its animal connection in the most overt and decidedly aggressive way possible is a motif in mythology as anthropology that I will never tire. Widow being a comment on the black widow spider of course, now a marvel hero and general term for femme fatale, again showing the anthropology of language in action within contemporary and historical media and literature.

9. Kiss: There are alot of pieces like this, I guess I just find affection sometimes too cannibalistic, we can’t see loving and smothering each other as completely normative when it is fuelled by unquenchable lust even now, in such a supposedly civilised time. Maybe it’s because I’m too British internally to want to be considered overly emotional or sexual, I just find myself cringing at the contemporary ways people are affectionate and flirtatious with you, porn culture certainly hasn’t helped this much, people are far more sexually active and affective nowadays because of it’s ever looming presence in contemporary relationships, both romantically and sexually. 

10. Window Licker: This piece is inspired by the afore mentioned influence of Aphex Twin on my youth, and this piece exists because I was listening to Aphex religiously during this project to keep myself focused, this piece is based on the famous Aphex song of the same name (2005), known for it’s gaudy and almost quite disturbing music video, a video which was a collaboration between Aphex and Chris Cunningham, Cunningham being known for his infamous short film ‘Rubber Johnny’ (2005), a surreal character study that is shot completely in the dark with night vision effects to capture Johnny’s odd figure and speech. I have always loved the vigorous bombast of 90s experimental music and Aphex was always someone who played with his image and public representation, often making masks of his bearded face to be worn by the dancers in his videos and on stage with him, sort of a piss take against cult of personality, giving a sardonic grin to popular culture’s love of making their idols into deities and making metaphorical busts of their image for marketing and merchandising. 

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Divider between The collections

I’m only posting this here as a quick divider between the collections, so it doesn’t all look blocked up when the time comes to look through my blog, especially because both the 57 and the 63 are different collections for reasons laid out in my differing publications, and so I want their captions too to be split up and given their own space from each other for legibility. 

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The 57, Part 6:

51. Ivan: I really honestly don’t know what inspired this piece, Ivan the Terrible? Ivan Millat? It has been bothering me for months now, I should know why all my pieces are named and drawn the way that they are, but this is proof of just how automatic my processes can get, not every piece is as conscious and direct as the others, and sometimes you get an Ivan that has no true origins and is clouded in mystery, if you can see a greater meaning in it then be my guest. 

52. Chupar: This image is based on one of the many images of hobgoblins and hags in Goya’s Caprices:

Source: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2019/prints-and-multiples/francisco-jose-de-goya-y-lucientes-los-caprichos

This image had always reminded me of the Baba Yaga and other folk tales of ghastly people sucking the life force out of people or eating children, quite a typical fear in pop culture given how many boogeymen and women exist in folktales. But I wanted to redraw it as it has almost a fellating quality to it, the idea of humanity and people generally as life suckers and absorbers for their own hedonistic gratification. Something that Goya is clearly criticising here as he often did in his works when discussing the aimlessness of hedonism and decadence in Spanish society when he was courtier to a king and even when he was destitute in death. A timeless issue clearly. There is even a concept in Satanism called “Energy Vampires”, people who go out there way to drain your energy socially and mentally, the same people who get off from bringing other people down or blaming someone else for their bad attitude and poor people skills, everyone has atleast met and been friends with someone like this at some point in there life I’m sure, some people just exist to bother other people, look at Mormons for example. 

53. Mush: This piece is more of a redrawing of the ‘Ted’ piece, and attempts to represent the uncanny as the conversation between where the humanity ends and where abhuman starts, and by that representation it also leads you to ask what is considered existence in reality and what can only be represented through fantasy as the result of such immense reimagining of real/ recognisable things and figures? The title is more a take on Ted as a mute pile of sentient and perceptive mush at the end of his story, begging the question what is considered alive or undead depending on being able to live and not live consciously when you are incapable of regular and autonomous functionality? This in turn leads into the controversial dialogs on ethical euthanasian and the like, but I won’t say more on that here. 

54. Revelation: Just like the piece ‘Trinity’, this piece is based on the ideas of biblical realism as represented through eldritch imagery, almost making abrahamic ideas of the divine and mystical into depictions of illustrative Lovecraftian realism. The idea of the book of revelations too being a book about destruction and a pessimistic end for the rest of humanity who didn’t give themselves over to god is quite a piece of inspirational material really, so I thought It would be fun to muse an image of this apocalypse with another abhuman depiction of a god or angel. 

55. Primate: This piece is about me playing with the image of a Palaeolithic man as collaged with natural motifs and cellular imagery surrounding them, as our ideas of dinosaurs and primordial animals are all speculative based on what we have found, but we can only imagine their appearance and the later appearances of man based on semblances of DNA evidence and examples of bones and hair, this for an artist is just an excuse to reimagine and play with the image of evolutionary history, especially of history long before the recognisable modern history of homo sapiens now, so excuse this piece as a surrealist idea of man before recognisability, and as seen as between the amoeba and the natural world etc.

56. Flare: This piece is simple enough, just another take on Biosophy and on nature, and man’s connectivity to it in life and death, the flare of life being eventually met by natures consumption of the body to create new life, as if the human body were a seed store ready to be cracked open and harvested from as with all animals eventually. This piece is one of my favourites, I love how graphic and morbid the aesthetic is, but it’s not too overbearing or graphic in an ethical sense either, just visually notable, and it sticks in my mind because of that. 

57. Matter: To quote myself again from the Robert Walters opportunity: 

“This piece is based on Rene Descartes' discussions on composite matter and his existentialist conversations on the objective and subjective in relation to how we experience the world outside of your own comprehension and comforts. As discussed in 'Discourse on Method and the Meditations' (1637). As featured in my current project 'Noumena'.”

This piece has been used in many of my previous competitions, for the primary reason that it represents my negotiations on objective forms and the semantics of noumenal influences on the human mind and our conventional understandings of the world and ourselves, the same discussion being had by Descartes long before I would ever attempt to represent it in art of course. And though Descartes discussed matter and existence to justify creationism, I use it for the opposite reason, that human beings are far too complicated and have to be the product of nature as matter cannot be made nor destroyed as goes the fundamental law of matter itself, and just because life when analysed at each layer is complicated and esoteric to the common mind, doesn’t mean some manmade idol is responsible for it. 

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The 57, Part 5:

41. Person: Based on the novella by Harlan Ellison ‘The Eyes of Dust’ (1967), and to give context from the man himself on the ideas behind this short story:

“Because, friends and neighbours, we live in a Time of Beautiful People. Gorgeous is revered. We can’t stand anything even remotely ordinary; it has to be young and lovely. So you are not where it’s at, if you aren’t pretty.”

Source: http://glenncolerussell.blogspot.com/2021/01/eyes-of-dust-by-harlan-ellison_8.html

The story follows an ordinary family at the bottom of the beautification ladder on the planet Topaz, their son ‘Person’, yes he’s called person, supposedly so abnormal and alien to the beautiful elite of Topaz that he has no name and gray eyes like sockets full of dust, open being found by the police at the end of the story he is burned alive and destroyed, his very visage so distinct to the vanity obsessed that he had to be killed. It reminds of the discussions I have to have about the values of using morbid and grotesque portraiture to create my commentaries on people and the world when people often flee from the ugly and alternative. I personally find beauty boring, after all, I could stare at my girlfriend all day but I wouldn’t learn anything I don’t already know, beauty is boring and fleeting, ugly and ultra-violent, grotesque and indifferent to vanity and egocentric appearances on aesthetics are dull as bricks to the thinking man, and to the artist it’s child’s play, anyone can paint a soft rose, but who can capture fear and gore without feeling it strike them to their core, to learn about the noumenal and the reality of the world and it’s people there has to be an ugly and catastrophic side to utopia and idealism, and though most want to avoid this and destroy all media that offends and assaults their senses it will always be relevant and introspective enough to be critical to the progression of mankind to see and analyse the minutia of the ugly and alternative to the sub-interesting ordinary. 

42. Topaz: This piece just echoes the same story as the last piece, except this time Person is drawn more realistically to the plot of the initial story and is shown here immolated for his function as the confrontational and cynical in the face of the mundane and predictable, the last messiah as I'm sure Zapffe would muse. 

43. Spore: This piece is very similar to many of the portrait in ‘The 63′, especially because of the reoccurring theme of Biosophy and nature as in a mutual relationship with man in life and death, this image being a body consumed with budding fungus spored through their body and feeding off of the original host, almost like a living mortification. 

44. Yamamoto: This piece is a tribute to Hideo Yamamoto and his famous manga ‘Ichi the Killer’ (2001), often considered to be sado-masochistic version the conflict of batman and the joker, wherein Ichi is the stand-in for batman, a repressed sadist who gets immense joy from beating and killing people, his initial sexual awakening coming from watching a group of people gang rape a school girl, and his joker being an extreme masochist in the form of Masao Kakihara, an enforcer for the Yakuza who is obsessed with mutilating his body and those get in his way, the personification of “If they’ll do that to themselves, then imagine what’ll do to you”. The relationship between the two is a constant struggle between admiration and bitter disgust for each other’s disciplines, a constant fight between a masochistic perversion of life and a sadistic one, they are both meant for each other and can’t live with the other around, it’s apparently quite a normative conversation in japanese culture, as in discussing whether or not your are a masochist or a sadist, literally to debate whether or not your are a dominant or submissive person, not so much in the sexual context, but Yamamoto’s work explores the graphic and shocking depths of this very conversation in a post-modern way, through graphic ultra-violence. My depiction here is based on the film version (2001) of Kakihara, as played by Tadanobu Asano, which is famous for being the cover art of the film within popular culture. 

45. Gregor: This is another take on Gregor Samsa, less bug like and more metamorphically dynamic in this version though, between the human and animal versions of himself. 

46. KSLV: I based this work on the emerging potential of Phonk music in popular culture. I was raised on The Prodigy, Fat Boy Slim, Basement Jaxx and Aphex Twin and so I see artists like KSLV as the emerging present and future of contemporary experimental music, Phonk has recently become extremely popular within internet music culture, coming from the same space as soundcloud rapping once inhabited, that of basement and bedroom dwelling artists coming out of the woodwork with all kinds of reimaginings of edm, synthwave, sampling from rap music to contemporary pop and underground music, from hardbass to hardcore Memphis rap groups and death metal. Phonk is everywhere currently and KSLV has stood out to me the most because I just couldn’t avoid him given the musical rabbit holes I often find myself in each late night, his music represents the european western fusion of the genre, coming from Germany and even using japanese art and motifs to illustrate his album covers and singles, even releasing an ep called ‘Noh’ (2022), as named based on the masks he uses to front his music:

Source: https://soundcloud.com/kslv_noh/dynamic

I can’t explain exactly why japanese motifs are so exciting for western artists exactly, my only real opinion on that is that western artists love the graphic nature of the imagery and the unforgettable aesthetics of japanese art, it’s just so refreshing when you spend the majority of your life seeing mainly european and modern art that just doesn’t excite many feelings of adventure in you the same way that Japan's iconic stylings do. Plus, we are a generation that was raised on anime and manga, and so it has alot to do with admiring the skill of japanese artists to craft memorable worlds and genre defining works such as Berserk or Naruto etc. This mask that I made was in reference to the same source image here, that of a hannya mask, the face of a grieving and ghoulish women in japanese folklore, they are always represented like this and are probably the most recognisable masks from noh and kabuki theatre. I won’t name anymore phonk artists as it’s really a rabbit hole worth exploring once you get the time to listen to a genre of music that is still deeply underground and slowly becoming more and more relevant as the months go by. 

47. Yog . W: I’ve spoken about this piece so often it’s ridiculous, I’m just going to quote myself from my application to the Robert Walters new artist of the year prize (as this was one of the pieces I picked to show my practice, given it’s prominence in this first volume of noumena as the front cover and it’s link to Lovecraft): 

“This piece is inspired by the works of Weird fiction authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, these authors are massively inspirational to the future of dark surrealists such as myself, because they discuss the posthuman, abhuman and nihilism beyond the conventions of sensible mankind as not being able to see past their own existence when considering the greater noumenal world and it's potential after and around us.  This exact entity being inspired by the story 'The Dunwich Horror' (1929) and the character Yog Whateley. As featured in my current project 'Noumena'.”

48. Nest: I don’t really know the exact reasons for this piece existing, I can only see it now as example of a pathogen making it’s way to the surface level from the inside, that of the traditions of body horror that the body is brimming with potential to be exploited by the horror artist as a nest for mutative exaggeration and mutilation beyond all recognition to take place. Other than that I would only be repeating myself when discussing the ideas of Cronenberg, Carpenter and Romero again. 

49. Damn: This image is very cartoonish, not at all a serious take on a demon, taking the idea of the words I said about the fantastical in history as represented through musings on theology and mythology, and running them through the aspect of caricature, almost to mock how silly the idea of animalised demons altogether, that comical idea that sin would be personified by clowns with horns and cloven hoofs, cheap scary characters to stop children from eating too many sweets before dinner and to scare them into saying thank you to everyone they meet, it’s honestly one of the more humorous aspects of hell to me, make the torturer more logical and grounded rather than making it a dog with an attitude and the ability to speak pig latin and you thusly have something to be far more afraid of. After all, the nazis didn’t need more than skull pins, leather jackets and enamel badges to scare the crap out of people, it’s about the presence one gives off, not the exaggeration of natural anxiety in the animal or it’s human hybrid features when made demonic, the reason demons were invented was to scare surfs hard enough into having them fearing the most abhuman thing the church could think of to scare unintelligent peasants into working so hard they could burn the sin out of themselves by dying of exhaustion rather than living in sin. I used to draw demons alot when I was much younger, but I can only see them as softcore shock nowadays, the real monsters are hiding in plain sight and have reason to use a pitchfork to intimidate you, media like ‘American Psycho’ (1991) have certainly turned people’s opinion in a more introspective and realistic expectation of true villainy and actualised demons in the real world, the contemporary damned as all those treat human life as lesser than the dead etc, sin and piety don’t even enter that conversation. 

50. Mope: This piece is simple enough, people wear their opinions and emotions on their faces, I remember once being confronted by a teacher once for having quite an animated face, I realised after that that I was giving it all a way and giving up my emotions, you can’t have a poker face or be a stoic in the face of challenges in life if you show so much emotion on your face that you might as well become a professional mime and go to clown school. Plus I don’t like mopey and dopey people, this face just annoys me and it’s easy to resign from humanity when all people do is wear this face over the slightest infractions in life, everyone loves a good mope and the english are Olympians at it, the ability to be alive and well is enough for me not to mope around and waste the muscles in my face. It must be odd to think that even though I see myself as an expressionistic artist, I see alot of human expression as irritating unless it’s done out of comedy and true performance, I just see so many people wearing their face like a license to moan and groan forgetting it’s their only shield against improper judgement and mockery, maybe I’m just to pessimistic to take people’s expressions seriously anymore I have no idea honestly. 

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The 57, Part 4:

31. Weep: As is clear now, I like making pieces that represent visceral ideas of emotional response and reactions to shock and reality itself etc, this being one of my favourite examples of how I represent the phenomenal through a noumenal aesthetic as it represents the weight of emotion as best experienced when we cry and exert ourselves, we are all accustomed this kind of reaction and it’s what gives people Oscars ever year when attempting to represent it the best. Upset and physical convulsions as the response to said upset and it’s discomfort in us is animal is the orgasm and the fart, we just can’t help but express our feeling into the ether as a natural response to existence and it’s challenges, in that moment of release we feel the weight of our emotions slip and slide over our conscious experience. 

32. Tense: This piece is about the fears we have for being trapped and held in a retainer in life, whether that’s your job, your relationship, your body or your mind, tension comes from not being able to release yourself from a conflict that is either historical or present with you now, it’s why mental illness or learning to accept yourself and your flaws or even responsibilities thrusted upon you, it makes people feel like hermits in their own world with no exit to ease, an existentialist conversation that I’ve already discussed before with Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ and the allegorical value of hell as the introspective prison in the works of Pascal too, humanity has always hated feeling boxed in and that’s never going to change. It is a natural response to hate tight and claustrophic situations, the same reason why it is a natural response to fear drowning and falling from a large height, the inability to move and function without duress is a normative and rational fear that all of us have experienced once we left the warmth of the enclosed womb, no tight space after that could ever match it’s comfort and innocence and feels like a threat on that nostalgia. 

33. Elephant: To me the pink elephant thought experiment has been bothering me for years now, and though it’s a good representation of the Dukkha in western theory (wanting something so bad that you never have it, compared to not worrying about it and getting it because you didn’t obsess over it etc) and helps people like myself overcome their issues with anxiety, horror media and pessimistic theory is all about that fukking elephant, it represents invasive thoughts and what they teach us about how we deal with obsessive thinking and negative ideas, and being a cynic of any kind means to confront these thoughts and debate them, not to learn to lose track of them and have them subside because that’s just more distractionism from the issue of the elephant in of itself. A lot of what I do feels like the elephant in the room to everyone else, especially when looking into humanity and studying its darkest ideas and histories, most want to cover the elephant in anything they can not to think about it, but as someone who studies and speaks on the elephant, it always becomes me job to make everyone think about the elephant, after all, it’s about how you deal with it’s ability to create anxiety and fear in you that is the real conversation and that is what people like Ligotti, Bataille and Thacker are all about, always against the totally rational opinions of the masses in their bubbles. 

34. Pulse: This piece is about exploring the nervous systems and almost exaggerating it to the point of exploding it and having it operate outside of the body as a collective of sensory antenna that pulse around us, a comment on how we experience the noumenal world in a sense, that we rely on feeling and phenomenology to sense the outer world around us, no mental picture of textual guide ever being good enough to represent the actual sensations of experience and being in the moment.

35. Trinity: This is my take on attempting to physically represent the noumenal through biblical referencing and then thusly playing with making realistic angels as a expression of that experimentation, just the idea of flared and spiralling ribbons of flesh as wings and eyes as the guiding light through the darkness that stare back at you. The trumpets being inspired by the supposed atmosphere of these approaching masses and their awe striking appearance to the sound of a symphony of noise and announcing power. I don't often care for religious overtones but given the name and the visuals people will always make religious connections so it's a better to be self aware of that then pretend to be above it as if religious art isn't still somehow inspiring to look at, but of course that's by design.

36. Slips: I based this piece off of the act of turning skin and muscle tissue into flaps and slipping them over troubled areas in the body to operate, makes for some real revealing imagery so of course I did my own map of that in this piece, and added all the eldritch details I could to make it all the more abhuman, it looks almost like a cephalopod from the mind of Lovecraft, a hybrid of a lovecraftian dream of man and the reality of man’s biology splayed and collaged together, like something out of a Max Ernst print.

37. Pollen: The title gives the piece away enough without me having to give you the whole book on it, pollen, an essential and crucial process of flora and fauna meeting through bees and their involuntary job of spreading pollen to the rest of nature to continue it’s prosperity, something we care less about now though, fukk the bees I guess, no one seems to care much about the cycle of life that much at all. I guess if the next generation can be aborted to the point of it being seen as a minute problem, then what love is lost over a couple bees right? Nature isn’t allowed to be ugly anymore, and that’s only because we don’t like the facts it presents without care of egos and proper marketing of dreams and ideals, so a process like pollen reminds me of this beauty to be found in a whole lot of other ugly ends of the food chain that so many take for granted, and this spreading of the seeds and spreading of life and nourishment is a magic in it’s own right, a craft we’ve forgotten to celebrate over time in the disconnect between mankind and animal kind. Rambling aside, it’s a comment on natural processes and their roots in cycling and the cycle of life and death expressed more openly through art.

38. Draugr: This piece is based on the norse idea of the creatures of the same name, another pessimistic image of resurrection as ghoulish and about representing the undead as played out by horror media and fancy tales in mythology etc, the Draugr being the corpses of dead warriors who haunt the crypts of the fallen to protect the honour of the dead, they can also be reanimated due to unfinished business and their incompatibility with the supposed the heroes welcome a warrior should get when reaching Valhalla. It’s another example of cultural ghosts and ideas on life after death so it’s become an exciting thing to see norse mythology revived in the contemporary culture and getting more media representation in games and film, which is what inspired this piece to begin with. 

39. Ted: This piece is based on the final part of Harlan Ellison’s seminal work “I have no mouth and I must scream”(1969), sharing a similar outcome to the notes of what I discussed in “Tense”, that being incapable of living as a free animal is just as bad as being dead, except far worse because of your conscious ability to perceive the world around you as rot in one place, and without being able to even react to your coma even with your eyes open and your other senses working perfectly fine to experience what’s left of the world around you. It’s one of the main reasons why the story is so memorable, the fate of Ted as a flesh sack to live eternally as the pawn of a sentient genocidal Ai who sees humanity as less than an ant nibbling at the dirt on his boot, a nihilistic satire on humanities dependence on power as the eventual undoing of humanity together, leaving all incapable of winning against nature’s ultimate catastrophe as beaten by man for the sake of his own greed. 

40. Civil: This piece is similar to the notes of “Yokai”, in that it’s an image of the wise and elderly as I’ve always imagined them, wisdom thusly imagined as a long eared, long nosed, a bloke or madam smoking a pipe and judging with only a glance, given my appearance I’ve gotten enough side eye in my life to have incredible peripheral vision to catch people out, but it always feels stranger from the old, their just so civil and yet so ever judgemental of the young as if they’ve never looked or been strange themselves in public and interpersonally. I don’t often believe in respecting your elders, only because age isn’t a good reason for authority over anyone, it’s easier to senile when your older and so I won’t always take those more degenerative than me more seriously than I would say someone slightly older than myself, I’m just judgemental like that in my own sense too. 

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The 57, Part 3:

21. Peaking: Speaking on curiosity again, this time from the framing of Nietzsche’s abyss, in that this piece represents the potential to see the darker reality peaking in from the abyss once you stare at it long enough, though our minds aren’t as quick to look away or avoid it’s stare, we are seduced by morbidity and the allure of darkness in spite of the light that which surrounds us. 

22. Stink: This piece is alot more about the excitement to be found in following your senses and instinctive drives, especially in the face of the alternative and morbid, though most see that as something to fear and be afraid of due to the discomfort it swells them with due to their dependency on their sensibilities, but sometimes you just can’t ignore the rising smell of something lingering in the doubts of your conventional mind, something that begs for engagement through olfactory response, it’s why the nose is relative to gut feeling and following it to something of interest or to avoid something again based on your gut instinct, each aspect of your life gives off of a smell, whether you can trust it or not is up to you and the daring part of your brain that wants to find out either way. 

23. Fiend: This image has something to do with the sleep of reason as argued by Francisco De Goya in the Caprices, that the ability to dream of demons and perversions of reality is only a lapse in reason away from happening to any of us, and in that isolating sleep anything can come to fruition if you allow it manifest enough, not many can find comfort in a lapse of reason or an abundance of doubt and conscious dread in the face of the unpredictable, reason keeps people from having fiendish thoughts and walking on the irrational side, but dreams will always be a window into life without rational comprehension as the subconscious is not as connected to reality as people really think it is considering it’s just a bank of the information you’ve ever perceived and experienced, later made into dissociative images and nightmares when thought about long enough. 

24. Gopnik: I drew this image as somewhat of a jab towards lesser culture and interests, chavy characteristics I guess you could say, but the term Gopnik being Russian has more to do with the hoodlum, the voluntarily ignorant in the face of culture, maybe it’s my elitist sense, but most of the audience is a hoodlum for not doing their homework or looking to take a piece of media or work seriously, it turn makes me feel disinterested in the rest of society and going to their level, I would rather work harder to be more oblique by the time I’m dead so as to invent my own language, instead of becoming the most accessible artist to those who won’t put in the effort. It’s important to recognise that this isn’t a comment on the working class, my family and many of my external family are working and they support what I do and always have done, but they don’t pretend to know everything about my work, but they still see what I do as a skill and respect that it takes alot to work as hard as I do given I still have a worker’s mindset, I’m no middle-class ponce that’s for sure. This piece is a comment on those who are able to indulge in culture, maybe even have the money to afford it at a premium, and yet money and class doesn’t guarantee you an identity and an intellect, the most neurotic people on the planet are those with no self-awareness, and I fear for our future with them in control. 

25. Masc: This piece is inspired by the contemporary standards of representing masculinity through alternative models and fashions, as often seen in the shows of Gosha Rubchinksiy, as based on this image in particular:

Source: https://hypebeast.com/2015/10/gosha-rubchinskiy-photo-book-dover-street-market-ny

I’ve always found models like these to be quite exciting to see, not for the sake of diversity of character, but for diversity of bone structure and face shape, haircuts lengths and lanky postures over muscles and softness, especially compared to the Arno Breker idea of post-modern masculinity as a return to the thulean image of superiority and eugenic excellence. It shows a realism in men that they are capable of being individual interesting and without much need of gentrifying the image so they can stand out next to the women, these Mick Jagger and David Bowie types are far more interesting to reimagine and play with as they aren’t the obvious image of a man or woman, they can sit between the two and still look alien enough to make a good fashion model, makes for great reference to me and it shows why I’ve taken more of an interest in contemporary fashion when the models actively look more artistic than ever, and men look like experiments on manhood, makes for an exciting conversation I would go as far to say. 

26. Emmet: This piece is inspired by the murder of Emmet Till during the times of segregation in America, after being beaten to death and left to float down a stream, his mother held his funeral as an open casket to teach all of the brutality of ignorance and bigotry, having seen his face in full resolution when I was still only prepubescent with a clay like brain, his face inspired my fascinations with snuff material and it’s ability to scare the very emotions out of people, to shock and educate at the same time, it’s why one Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924) constantly gets cited in my work, horror in an actual case of ultra-violence and brutality can really strike a chord with people, but it will always tow the line between morbid curiosity and mourning. 

27. Bully: This piece is more of a side comment, seeing the things that bother us as shit eating bullies at the back of our minds, demons over our shoulders telling us to go against the quo or our own wishes for comfort, both the self and the external world as pushing you around no matter what you do. I takes a full ego death not to feel defensive or bullied by anything I feel, we’ve all had that voice or that person who tests our limits, and the outcome isn’t important really, it’s the ability to doubt and to question your own value in the face of adversity that challenges you the most, how you overcome that peer and internal pressure is highly up for debate as some are more malleable than others. But it’s not picture pressure of any kind as a bully hoping for nature to eventually consume you as you become enveloped in the downward spiral that is doubting yourself and your own reality. 

28. Peel: Another study on skin and my fascinations with it, peeling back someone like an onion, only to find more and more layers to human anatomy, we really are such incredible images of composite laying and all the finer mechanics between each peeled back layer, if there were aliens out there they would need to be more layered then us to be considered interesting from a biological and scientific stand point. 

29. Crust: This is one of the more fungal images, again showing the fusion between man and nature, even the ability for nature to feed off of us as it does with any other creature, and like fungus over a tree or a corpse, it creates a crust of pulsating life over it’s food, adding to the layered potential of nature and man’s connection with it as the hunter and prey, or the eater and the feeder. 

30. Difflam: I drew this piece when I and my girlfriend were so ill in the winter of 2021 that we felt incapable of imaging ourselves well in the future. We had avoided all sicknesses for close to over a year and were hit by a super flu, for two weeks we kept throwing up phlegm and bodily fluids of all kinds, fearing as humans do that we weren’t going to get better, all we had was Difflam to numb our throats as we unloaded more and more phlegm, like spider eggs hatching in our throat and filling our mouths with bile, it was horrid. It made me ruminate on the anxieties around pathogens and the worst outcome of illnesses, losing control of your body as the short answer to those ideas as to why it scares and bothers us so much, even though we recovered after 2 weeks of manic sickness it still stuck with me after that, the fear of being so ill that you couldn’t even eat, but you could feel your body responding and reacting without your consent, only to act as the function of it’s whims and to let out bad material for the sake of the survival of the body. It makes you feel like a puppet to entropy. 

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The 57, Part 2:

11. Hyperopic: I’ve already written about this piece before in casual detail, and in relation to it’s inspiration in the Seraphim of old christian mysticism, the titling of this piece speaks more to the pressure of far sightedness, my generation especially can’t look too close at the world now or at themselves to learn for that future they are dying over before it’s even happened. All of us are so afraid of the future that we don’t know how to live in the present, we are daydreaming about extinction while we neglect our families and responsibilities, it’s no wonder people don’t want to commit to people or jobs or ideas anymore, we aren’t patience enough and attention spans are lessening as time goes on and consumerism becomes the dominant interest for all man, immediate gratification will not have visible consequences now, but those dreams of a future apocalypse will be the result of our current such blind infatuations with shortcuts and procrastination. 

12. Lazarus: I made this piece as a contemplation on resurrection, what a horrid idea in reality, zombies, vampires and most other folkloric ghouls exist in this problematic, and yet I’m supposed to look to the dead rising out of god’s love as a blessing, who made it that coming back from the dead could be a benefit? Interfering in nature and imagining thusly the original visage won’t be corrupted and corroded due to it’s rise from mortification and sod is absurd. The bible doesn’t support necromancy and dark mysticism, but it does promote necrophilic ideas on preserving the visage of it’s martyrs and religious heroes, in turn it’s my opinion that most pessimists see christanity as a doomsday cult waiting for illusionary second coming as the emergence of zombies and angelic vampires rise to consume the living or to damn them to hellfire, sounds odd doesn’t it when you think about it metaphysically? But that’s just religion for you, resurrection in horror media has always been a way of proving the horrific potential of the uncanny, and the undead and once dead scare the shit out of most people, that’s why zombie and undead in general based films have been selling tickets since the 1920s. 

13. Old: This image is about me playing with how I see the old as between dead and living, in the same way that when I come across a skull discovered in an archaeology dig when perusing the internet, I can’t help but imagine the life that skull had, the generation differences between me and them and how we would have shared DNA and cognitive ability, it’s often something that can fill you with existential dread when you think about it long enough, because that rule of thinking too exists in babies and foetuses. Reminding me thusly on Georges Bataille's comments in the beginning chapters of ‘Eroticism’ (1957), that we see our offspring as our discontinuity, though they are made from us, they are not us, and so they represent both the end of the line and the continuation of the human race overall, the only way we could exist as exact continuations of the first man is if if we bred through mitosis and asexual reproduction. I find such conversations on studying mortality to be utterly fascinating and by no means terrifying, it’s an aspect of life that horror loves exploring because a fear of death, aging and rebirth or the continuation of our legacies, is one of the fundamental reasons why people like Ernest Becker wrote his seminal work ‘The Denial of Death’ (1973) to discuss immortality projects and how death and entropy underpin all our values and choices in life. Truly a fascinating idea to anyone with enough time to look into it as one the fundamental conversations in existentialist theory. 

14. Melt: This image is another take on the previous image ‘Pressure’ , this time it’s far more aggressive and resistant to the pressure, melting in the face of adversity though is still a pain and maybe more painful than accepting the initial succumbing to the pressure, it always reminds me of the idea that 95% of addicts relapse, meaning the real effort of sobriety in the face of adversity is staying sober and not always the value of the adversity in of itself. That’s how I best associate giving into pressure based on my own experiences I guess, but the same could be applied to any anxiety based illness, it’s how you consistently work against your instinct to quit and be overcome that makes you stronger as Nietzsche always said. 

15. Smooch: This piece was a direct riff on Gustav Klimt’s “Kiss” (1907):

Source: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-klimts-iconic-kiss-sparked-sexual-revolution-art

As someone who was obsessed with the work of Egon Schiele and by proxy studied works of Klimt (though I always enjoyed the visible anxiety and sexual explicitness of Schiele’s work more), and have come to see this painting as certainly one of the most memorable paintings that can exist in the zeitgeist, but it’s far too ideal for me and the reality of most intimate relationships. I only say this because the paranoia of contemporary love and erotica is centred around what is visible and what is hidden, what you share with the world and what is left for the voyeur to scrape off your sheets once the love has left the room. As someone who is lucky enough to be in love even after previous abuse I know the anxiety and pressure that comes with contemporary relationships, both platonic and erotic, from your parents, friends and all the pressures in between. It’s alot about struggling with expectation of how to act and how to feel when in a relationship and when you see yourself as one of two and not just an individual, it’s why people are so often afraid of affection and commitment, it can feel as if it’s not even your relationship and as if people are entitled to your love as a form of gossip and not as exhibit of actual intimate connections done well. I’m lucky enough not to be a relationship that cares about outside attention or gossip, but it’s just an observation of mine that soap operas ruined public relations of all kinds as people will always look for the next secret and entertaining snapshot of reality rather than allowing nature to occur uninterrupted, people just want the fantasy of love, passion and sex, without caring much for the humanity behind. This visible and present attitude among my generation especially, can turn into a peepshow waiting to watch the next set of animals fukk sure enough, it’s why porn was one of the first major industries to succeed on the internet when it was invented and still continues to thrive today, voyeurism has never been more in fashion with the accessibility of the internet. 

16. Stench: This expressionistic portrait is how I’ve always imagined the prudish, the sensible and convention to look when discomforted by anything, as if they just smelt the most retched of smells and can’t wait to swallow their own spit just to drown their taste buds from its influence. It’s the typical reaction of most people to react when confronted by anything, as if their senses have been flown into overdrive and that can’t help but feel a full body reaction to each now infraction, given how provocative I’ve been in the past about certain ideas on politics, religion and the sciences I have seen these faces hundreds of time in my short life already, it’s worse than a fiery rebuttal as it shows my their brain can’t even entertain a more relaxed approach or sense of open mindedness to what has just said. It’s almost the same as nervous smiling or crying when you panic, just the body responding to the brain telling it to react without words and without proper logic, either to tense or release muscle function on command, I would say try testing this out anywhere but just mindful of who you test it out on seeing as people seem to not like it when you get them to react facially to inspire art pieces, just my own experience speaking there. 

17. Gape: Another oral sexual comment coming through, don’t google gaping if you enjoy eating donuts, but the act of opening and inflaming muscles for sexual purposes is a common enough practice is experimental sexual practices, whether that be with poppers or kinds of tingling and numbing lubricates to ease muscle responses for penetration, the mouth is the only part of the body that is constantly prepared for this experimentation and is often fetishised for this very reason, with large lips on the mouth being to represent large labia downstairs as some psychoanalysis's would argue. Beyond the sexual, the anatomical suggestion of opening up and staring inside the body to study how it contracts and retracts is something I often draw about, the idea of expanding and exaggerated muscles that emphases the majesty of our real anatomy is quite interesting to me, it makes you think what larger animals and being beyond our understanding would be like with greater systems such as this, or without them entirely would function, especially given how complex we see our own bodies, just image existences even more complicated and dynamic then our own. 

18. Slip: I see this piece as the idea of slipping in and out of our skin, as if our skin where a mask and a cover in more than a literal sense, something that we could remove, or grow and tether to more and more skin, it’s often strange to debate skin as the largest and most underrated organ on the body as it really does do a lot for us and yet I feel most take it for granted, I certainly do given mines covered in tattoos. But like any other organ, skin is an identity as well as a functioning part of a system of other organs that we need to survive, it’s an emblem of evolutions majesty and yet it’s also our blank canvas to create new identities beyond our natural form, in the way that we cover it, dress it and stretch to fit our needs and physiology, skin is not only crucial to our existence as animals, but a social tool of immense imaginative potential for us humans who wish to do so much with it while we are able to. 

19. Yokai: This image is based on the Daitengu of japanese folklore, the title is more a blanket term for all creatures of japanese folklore altogether, but the visual motifs of this image are based primarily on the tengu as it’s again another very popular image found within japanese pop culture alongside onis and hannyas, I focused on the tengu though for its connection with hermitage in japanese culture, that of the mountain priest who lives in total isolation, as quoted by this Yokai wiki cite here:

“Daitengu are much larger and imposing than kotengu. They usually appear in a more human-like form; usually that of a man dressed in the robes of an ascetic monk, with a red face, an incredibly long and phallic nose (the longer the nose, the more powerful the tengu), and large, feathered wings sprouting from their backs. Only rarely do they appear in the more primitive avian form of the lesser tengu. Daitengu live solitary lives on remote mountaintops, far removed from humanity. Their time is spent in thought, meditation, and perfecting themselves. They possess greater pride, wisdom, and power than their lesser tengu cousins. They can also be just as savage and unpredictable, making them potentially much more dangerous. In fact, natural disasters and other great catastrophes are often attributed to the wrath of a powerful daitengu. However, they also possess more self-restraint, and some of them are occasionally willing to give aid to worthy humans.”

Source: https://yokai.fandom.com/wiki/Daitengu

This idea of wisdom as represented through a long nose and their common depiction as being white haired monks, always stuck with me and reminded me that japanese folklore exists because they had to have a reason for everything and had to make their folklore as logical as any other part of the world, it’s a common thread among humans to be make stories and iconography to discuss the noumena through fantastical deities and the stories that proceed them, I just like the Tengus the most because of how they represent the wise and powerful, the same way we do, big ears and noses, the inverse of clowns I guess. But If I was going to represent Deoffal in any kind of the way then I would most likely do that with some kind of Noh tengu mask to show the cultural fusion of my practice overall, and to represent my hermetic presence in the contemporary art scene. 

20. Timid: This piece is all about looks being deceiving, the idea of the top visage and artifice to any argument, character study or concept, its a conversation most artists have to have with themselves about anything they find interesting enough “am I going deep enough? And am I looking beyond the surface level long enough to make smart inferences on my current subject?”. You can’t be timid in the face of curiosity, no matter how much you may fear the backlash of going too far or what you may find along the way as the revelations begin and continue to unfurl in front of you leaving your more enamoured than the last, it’s always been a negotiations of Lovecraft's work that voluntary and conscious curiosity into the uncanny and incomprehensible is what has the most potential to create truly mind bending nightmares and existential dread in the thalassophobic water’s of our imagination. Meaning that the face value of a subject is always the most pleasant, in the same way that the most friendly demeanour or attitude is always a good cover to the dark reality beyond the mask, all are capable of looking past it, but only a few can look deep enough to think critically beyond the recognised and assumed as based on our initial perceptions and education etc.