Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori

Having worked from crime scene photos and police records briefly to create images comparing the brutal and the brutalised, it was a small step to start working with medical files. I chose to use images from the Gillies Archive at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup, London. The images come from Sir Harold Gillies' pioneering work reconstructing the faces of soldiers from the First World War. This was uncharted medical territory, and many of the soldiers, already having suffered tremendous injuries fighting in Europe were subjected to further agonising treatment as a result of the experimental medical techniques being used.

In the same way that I was interested in the different reactions of people towards the victims of murderers I wanted to gauge how people felt about the unpleasant looking faces of these soldiers. I actually watched a documentary around this time about how the brain is wired to reject the deformed.

I painted this guy in under 2 hours. I remember having to rush it out in order to meet a friend at the pub for a session of Classical Chinese revision. The unfortunate airman crashed his maiden flight and was engulfed in burning kerosene. He didn't die until after Gillies attempted to graft skin from his chest to his face after excising the burnt tissue. I find something hopelessly tragic about stories like this. I didn't want to be too melancholy though, so instead tried to emphasise the kind of stoic dignity that these men seemed (to me-abstracted through 80 year old documents) to possess.

I blew up the canvases, these two are about 180cm tall, which gave me a chance to use bigger brushes and be more expressive in the way I pushed the paint around the canvas. I think they worked ok. 

The Christmas Address

I write to you all from my heart and my home...


As a die-hard atheist, I only enjoy Christmas as a seasonal festival and a tradition ingrained in European culture. That said, it is a rich one. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you had a very merry Christmas, and hope you bring some of that festive cheer through the New Year, and on into the next. Once you strip away all the food, take away the wrapping paper and shrewd Christmas marketing ploys, you're left with something really special. I just think it's a shame that you only see that kind of warmth at Christmas.

So from my favourite carol, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen:

All you within this place,
Now with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace

Merry Christmas from Beijing.

The Painter and the Shark. Part 1

Once upon a time there was a painter. Everybody said he was the best painter in the village of Ham. Unfortunately he was the only painter in Ham, and the painter knew that he could paint anything he wanted and he would still be called the best painter in the village. To begin with, the painter was happy being the only painter in Ham, until one day he went to another village called Berg, and saw that there was a painter living there too. The painter from Ham thought that the painter from Berg was much better at painting than him, and became very confused.

He went back to Ham and thought for a long time about what being the best painter in Ham meant. He was very sad, and for a long time he only used black paint. He painted beautiful portraits and landscapes in black; all of the trees were black, the clouds were black, the sun was black and the sky was black too. He painted eyes black, noses black, teeth black and skin black. His paintings looked like black squares, but people still said he was the best painter in Ham.

One day the painter went for a walk to the beach. He borrowed a boat from his friend the sailor, and went out to sea with his pencils, pens and paper. He rowed out a long way, until he couldn't see Ham on the horizon anymore, and looking up he could only see the silvery grey of the sky above him and the deep, dark black of the sea beneath him.

Even though he was very tired, he took out his pens to draw the sea. He stared into the deep for a time, and drew exactly what he saw. He leant so far over the edge of his boat to peer into the water than he slipped on an orange peel in the boat and fell into the sea.

He began to sink into the cold water and was very scared. All of a suddent, out of the black all around him there emerged a face. It's grinning, wide mouth was full of sharp, jagged teeth; its nose was long and shaped like a triangle and it had tiny black eyes. The shark grinned and opened its cavernous mouth to bite the painter and swallow him whole. The painter screamed and tried to get away, but only bubbles came out of his mouth. The shark bit him and carried him down into the deep, dark abyss.

The Victimised

When I moved back to London from Beijing, I lucked out on a place to live. A friend and I lived in a 4 story town house in Camberwell, South London. The rent was cheap, the landlord nice and the apartment huge. While not the prettiest areas of London, Camberwell is very conducive to creativity. There are two art schools in the SE5 postcode zone (City and Guilds of London and Camberwell College), which means there are a lot of creative types hanging around with their moustaches, tight jeans and baggy vests.

The couple of years I lived in Camberwell were really very productive for me. I produced a lot of paintings and felt like I was making a lot of both technical and theoretical progress in my work. For the first time I made paintings for reasons other than finding peoples' skin interesting, etc. though that played a part in some of my decision making.

I became interested in the idea of victims and the way society deals with victims of crimes compared to the perpetrators. I was astounded in both mine and my friends' ability to name one or two serial killers, for example, but unable to name any victims of any serial killers, except perhaps Katherine Tate or Gianni Versace.

I started with the above painting of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia. She was a B movie actress whose dismembered body was found by police in 1947. Her killer was never caught, but the story has been the subject of a couple of movies, the more recent one starring Josh Hartnett, I think. I was surprised by the reaction a few people had to the painting.

In light of the way people reacted to my painting of the Black Dahlia, called "Black", I rushed to finish a new painting, the one above. I hung the two next to each other and people used to comment on the playful colour, etc. usually preferring the latter until I explained that it was a painting of Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer who murdered 17 men and boys, eating some of them and sleeping with their bodies. I think the point I wanted to make was: a horrid mask does not a monster make.

Beijing Paintings

So these are a couple of the paintings I bashed out when I was living and studying in Beijing in 2007. I produced more that were even worse than these few, but they were destroyed in a dramatically successful accident involving lighter fluid and a barbecue.

I've never been satisfied with these and certainly don't intend to display them ever, even given an opportunity. It's probably important not to forget what I learned from painting them though. I also painted my first landscapes around this time.

                        

Beijing Sketchbooks

A few samples from my sketchbooks when I was studying modern and classical Chinese at Beijing Normal University 北京师范大学 in 2007。 

The Carceral Continuum

The panopticon was conceived in 1785 by Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher and critical thinker. The panopticon is a building, a penal facility, where convicted criminals are held for the protection of the remainder of society, or for more punitive reasons, depending on your stance on the matter. Bentham was a utilitarian thinker, he was also relatively progressive. He argued in favour of the decriminalisation of homosexuality, equality for women, the abolition of slavery and of the death penalty and furthermore argued against the use of corporal punishment.

Instead, he proferred the panopticon, a term of his own devising. In the panopticon, the prisoners exist under the illusion that they are being continually observed by an unseen prison warden. In his own words, the panopticon was: "A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever chooses to have it so, against abuse." Bentham's letters go on to explain the possibility of extending the use of the panopticon into schools, hospitals and mental institutions ("mad-houses"), before closing with the remark: "What would you say, if by the gradual adoption and diversified application of this single principle, you  should see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society? - morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the gordian knot of the poor-laws not cut but untied - all by a simple idea in architecture?"

The panopticon therefore encourages a version of the Hawthorne Effect, where a sampled peoples' behaviour is modified by the knowledge that they are being observed. Bentham's idea of the panopticon however, creates and encourages the illusion that the prisoners are under constant surveillance; and moreover that at any given moment they do not know whether they are being observed or not. This belief/uncertainty produces the same effect in a populace as actual observation, and causes the populace to internalise to an extent the expectations placed on their behaviour by their observer, regardless of his/her uncertain existence.

In today's World I see this "Panopticon-Effect" becoming ever more pervasive. Imagine the fake CCTV cameras available for people to buy and place around the outside of their homes. What of the banks of real CCTV cameras in railway stations and on the street? What about idea (ever forwarded by crime and spy dramas) that our phone calls can be traced, or that our movements can be tracked by the use of our Oyster Cards? How about the internet, where our supposed anonymity is a joke; where one's Facebook profile and laxity in privacy settings can allow almost anybody to follow one's actions. What about blogging?

The point is, that more and more people seem to exist in this state of induced submissiveness, in which the subconscious awareness of the omniscience of "the authorities" transforms the population in to a more easily controllable herd.

"To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself into a state of vulnerability- chaotic, confused, vulnerability; to inform yourself." -T. Leary.

London

Having finished at high school and sixth form in Norfolk, I moved to London to continue studying. As it happens, I didn't study art, but Modern and Classical Chinese. I lived in a small flat in King's Cross with 5 other first year students at my university, The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Even at this time I was aware of, and emphatically agreed with Francis Bacon's assertion that all art schools should be burnt and artists should just be given paint, canvas and brushes. I'd spoken to friends who'd gone to art schools and found that as painters, sculptors, etc. they'd be pushed, at the urging of their art school teachers away from traditional media into more experimental, conceptual ways of working. It was fashionable to make pieces that were confusing for the sake of it. I just wanted to paint.

I wasn't interested in any themes in particular, though certain ones seemed to force themselves forwards. I looked for interesting faces, where the colours changed dramatically or the features were twisted or obscured in a certain way. Skin was just a series of colours and tones and I wanted to play with expressing those through paint. Nothing more.

A Piece of Tree Trunk

I painted my first clutch of portraits at the age of 15 or so, at which time I was mostly interested in finding something I was better at than my classmates. I was lucky, as there were only two of them. Portraits became my niche in a dreary Norfolk school, and I whiled away hours that may have been better spent studying something else, perched on a hewn piece of tree trunk that had been hauled into the art studio for some forgotten woodworking project by a previous student.

I produced at that time a few pieces that I'm still immensely proud of, such as the examples included in this post. Though the brushwork is sloppy, the use of formal elements pretty uninspired and the themes worked on mostly derivative, I have to remind myself that I was no older than 16 when I finished these. I'm sure Raphael was much better at that age than I was, but he'd never suffered English secondary education. Also, it's not fair to compare yourself to others.

This post is more than an excuse to reminisce on things that I think I've achieved. I want to, by introducing my paintings post by post, to see if I can't notice something about my own development as a painter that I haven't seen before. It's impossible to say what the next step as a painter will be, but by looking back I might be able to see how the road has forked and twisted this far. Thanks