| Introduction |
|
|
| Written by Administrator | |
| Nov 26, 2008 at 03:53 PM | |
|
Introduction To Cypher - The Panic Artist
'CYPHER' a blunt signature of failure, is scrawled in clumsy capital letters upon the most violent and pornographic paintings in Irish art history. My signature - confirms what the viewer can suspect from my imagery - that this is a pathological art - this is 'Panic Art! 'Cypher has been my artistic stamp for sixteen years and it announces to all those with eyes to see - that I know I am an artist of no importance and a man of no social prestige or influence, living in a Godless universe without meaning. This was typical of an artist with a split-personality and no fixed identity. As Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC) said - those whom the Gods wish to destroy - they first make mad. Burdened with ambitions largely beyond my technical or intellectual scope I lived in embittered isolation and I adopted the defense mechanism of an external alter-ego - 'Cypher' - to take the responsibility for my failure as an artist and as a human being. All this was characteristic of the schizophrenic patient observed by R.D. Laing who declares himself dead to avoid murder or the impotent man who avoids castration by failing to gain an erection. It was a sly game of double bluff - if I could not be the greatest artist - maybe I could be the greatest non-artist (in fact most in the art world have flatly refused to accept my pornographic paintings as art). The choice to change my name also had a sexual element related to my adolescent interest in the phenomenon of the Eunuch - which at the age of twenty, I felt close to becoming. Never mind feeling inferior to Alpha males, I felt worthless in comparison to many modern western young women who soared on a wave of feminist political actions, fucked freely and some of which held positions of greater power and authority within society and the art world - than I could never hope to achieve. So all my work is about failure. In a world of sales-talk, hype, spin, and cunning manipulation - I am trying desperately to tell the truth of my life and art as openly and honestly as possible. These days I am highly sceptical about my art and life - many of my friends say I am far too self-critical. I appreciate their support - but I would rather be too hard on myself than too vain and proud - those thoughts only lead back to the bad old days of my youth. I am a thirty-seven year old (b. 1971) Irish Outsider/Expressionist/Realist painter and writer living and working in Dublin. I have been painting seriously for twenty-seven years - and my surviving oeuvre contains twenty-one years worth of paintings and drawings. My paintings are expressive non-academic figurative works. I consider recording the human condition more important that playing aesthetic games. I think I have always been deeply conservative artistically and morally. However, I had to try everything out in life, art, porn and sex - in order to discover I had no sustained appetite for most of it. I have suffered depression for most of my life. In fact, I doubt I have had a whole-unbroken week of happiness since the age of six. If I did, it was when too doped up on Hashish to feel or think anything. Yet I also view madness as an artistic strength - the secret key to the subconscious roots of creativity at its most raw and unfiltered. My art education - such as it is - consisted of a series of night classes taken intermittently over the course of twenty years, from the age of thirteen to thirty-three (mostly with private tutors or in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin), and one ill-disciplined year in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design 1989-90.
Since 1987 - I have spent over e71, 800 of my own money on art materials, over e8, 500 of my own money on art books, meanwhile I travelled to see art in L.A. once, Paris twice, Amsterdam six times, London twice, Barcelona once, Madrid once, Cork five times and Berlin most recently. To date my oeuvre contains over 2, 513 paintings (acrylics, watercolours, oils, alkyds, mixed-media, collages or pastels - mostly on watercolour paper) and over 2, 307 drawings (pencil, ink, coloured pencils, conte, or charcoal - mostly on watercolour paper). I have also written two texts; The Panic Artist 721pp (my autobiography in four volumes) and The Panic Texts 330pp - which total 1051 pages. Which means that on average - I create about two paintings, two drawings and a page of writing a week. These are the kind of exact figures another more cynical artist might have invoked for humorous and grandiose effect - but I list them out of a need for neurotic detail. I have never had a job and have had a limited social life, which explains why I have been able to produce such a mass of art works and writing. Since November 2000, I have sold over e43, 200 worth of art. The highest price paid for one of my paintings was e10, 792 (The Dialectic of Emotions 1995 - sold in the Oisin gallery in November 2000). The average price for one of my works has been around e300 - e1, 000. My art is in private collections in Ireland, America, England and Australia. In 2005 I also received e1, 400 in for the film option rights to my autobiography The Panic Artist (the option expired and the film was never made). I mention these monetary gains - not because it matters a dam to me - but because it seems to matter so very much to everyone else. The greatest influences on my art have been the painters; Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vincent van Gogh, Richard Gerstl, Lucian Freud, Julian Schnabel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn and Willem De Kooning. Technically there are many contemporary academics and art-star painters who are more skilful and talented than me - but the power of my paintings comes from their directness, energy, and wilful shattering of taboos. All my work has been drawn, painted and collaged by me alone - I have never had assistants. * * * I am a skillful artist, but not nearly as proficient as I need to be and certainly not the great artist I thought myself to be when young. In fact in world terms I am little better than a fourth rate painter, third rate draughtsman and third rate writer and intellectual. I am the acme of political incorrectness - a white, male, western, provincial, Outsider/Expressionist/Realist painter of pornographic images. Doors are closed upon me that artists with only a tenth of my talent but who comply with all the politically correct notions and artistic modes of the day have held open for them. My art and my life has been stigmatised twice over, first by my use of pornography and secondly by my early history of madness. Thus I have constantly been put in a position of justifying my art and myself. Some say I am only out to shock people - nothing could be further from the truth. To my mind shock for its own sake is worthless aesthetically and philosophically - I aim to create understanding. My work is more than a cry for help - it is a plea for honesty and an attempt at self-reconstruction. I have spent twelve years meticulously analysing and deconstructing my art and life in my writings - to give my expressionist/realist paintings an analytical backbone. It may seem an arrogant and self-involved thing to do - but it is in fact a highly courageous, honest and psychologically difficult thing to do. My view of existence is bleak and unforgiving. It is only through art that I can give my life any sense of meaning or existential value. I do not believe in any God what so ever. I believe human beings are little more than jumped up chimpanzees - with a very high opinion of themselves. I believe that there is absolutely no universal or spiritual meaning to life - and that much of it is random and meaningless. Holding these views is very depressing - and they take a toll upon ones psyche - but I would rather live without illusions, than live a life filled with superstitious beliefs that have no scientific or rational basis. * * * I am a privileged, upper-middle-class, home-owner - and this background has given me the freedom to paint non-stop throughout my life. Without this foundation - I might have easily found myself homeless. However, I loathe my class - and my whole artistic oeuvre has been based upon an attack against the ethos of middle-class life; education, social responsibility, academic qualifications, professional employment and moral, religious and economic hypocrisy. Yet I must admit I still have a middle-class love of the portable and commercial oil painting - a result of the dreams I had for myself as a child - despite the obvious class-values and conservative aesthetics it involves. So my rage filled paintings thrust socio-political, socio-sexual and existential issues at the public - through the relatively conventional and bourgeois medium of paint on canvas. My whole life is shaped to preserve my autonomy and energy for my art. I usually leave the house no more than twice a week. I travel outside Dublin rarely - no more than once a year - and I travel abroad no more than once a year. I keep in touch with the world through television, radio, the inter-net, books, newspapers and magazines. I live a reclusive hermitic life by choice. I pick and choose my friends and social contacts carefully. Most people bore me to tears. I am distrustful, easily offended and never forget a slight. I am agoraphobic, hypocondrical and fearful and suspicious of people. I always assume the worst of them unless they prove me wrong. With my best-friends - I am quick to mock their shortcomings and with my enemies I am vicious in my put-downs. But my criticism of others - is nothing compared to my criticisms of my own art and myself. I cannot stand mediocrity and the stupid, infantile nature of the mass media. I rarely call to friend's houses and prefer them to visit me. With my closest friends I am loyal, affectionate and emotionally supportive. People who dont know me as a person like to demonize me - as some kind of cartoon evil villain - friendless, humourless, unloved and loathed by everyone. Nothing could be further from the truth - I have never been short of male or female friends in my life - but normally (because of my all consuming obsession with my art or crippling depression and shyness) I have chosen to be by myself. In fact I much prefer being safe in my house with my girlfriend and my dog and cats - than socializing with others in town. When they do see me - my friends say they appreciate; my honesty, loyalty, intelligence, open-mindedness, lack of racism or bigotry (they know I adore women and art no matter what my art and writings might suggest to those who have never met me) my saucy, surreal and black humour, my love and support for my mother, and my fondness for my pets. Some who have befriended me thinking I was some kind of Anarchistic Drunken Punk - have been shocked and disappointed by my reserved, genteel, home-loving, bourgeois and academic other side. I eat very little and usually have only one meal a day. I eat out only a half a dozen times a year usually in fast-food places like McDonalds, KFC or Eddie Rockets. I am no great fan of Pub culture and do not drink very much. I get about one hair-cut a year. I cannot stand silence so I have the television, radio or stereo playing all the time. I watch a quite a bit of television; the news, art documentaries, history documentaries (especially about World War Two), professional Championship boxing fights, UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship - a form of mixed martial arts), and some reality television shows. I also listen to BBC Radio Five Live, BBC Radio Four, RTE Radio 1 and Talk-Radio 106 FM. I constantly read English and US newspapers on-line; The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Standard, The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent - but mostly for their art reviews. I love Indie, Grunge, Goth, and Rock bands as well as singer-song writers, Jazz, Opera, Hip-Hop, Rap and Blues - which I usually have blasting from my stereo as I paint. Money means little to me. I spend it as soon as I get it. Of course I would love to make a decent living from my art - however I now recognize the dangers of artistic megalomania and greed (for the creative life of an artist - success can be just, if not more poisonous than failure). Tabloid fame frightens the wits out of me. Celebrity culture disgusts me. Crowds are horrific to me. However I will admit I am desperate for respect from my artistic peers and critics. I live more for art than for life. For me art is a Monk like pursuit of enlightenment. Except I have no faith to reassure me. My cynicism and misanthropy was born from idealistic hopes and dreams - that had been dashed on the rocks of reality. Evil for me - had been a search for truth. The answers I found were that many of these sexual and social actions were wrong. The only excuses I could offer for my early youthful transgressions were my lack of a father figure, my insane childhood and my lack of a moral compass due to my social isolation. Now as a middle-aged man - I am deeply ashamed of my young life. I have lived nearly my whole life in darkness - but I have always desperately looked for the light. My only hope is that I can live the second half of my life in a more humane and moral manner. I still believe that prostitution should be legalized and regulated - if only to protect those who work in the industry. However, I think pimps and human-traffickers should be locked away. I still believe in the right of adults to look at and make pornography. However, I also now know the social costs to all those that make and use such material - and believe that child-porn should be cracked down on hard. I still believe in female sexual equality - however I recognize now that there is an inbuilt, primal double-standard - which women can avoid only at their peril. I still believe that Hashish and Marijuana should be legalized - however I believe this should not be extended to other drugs. I still believe in a womans right to choose an abortion. Yet I am worried by the use of abortion as a form of contraception. I still believe in female equality - however I also think the sexes are profoundly and forever different. I also think that female emancipation has not only proved that women are capable of brilliant achievements on a par with most men - but also capable of the vilest sexual, social, political and domestic crimes - again on a par with most men. I am still a pacifist - however I view soldiers as much the victims of war as civilians and I still think some wars (not many) are necessary. I still do not believe in God - however I believe that social morality is vital for the survival of civilization. Moreover, no matter how much I might doubt Gods existence I do not want to mock or debase anyone elses religious beliefs.
However I have to admit - that the second I enter an art gallery as Tony Hancock in The Rebel (1960) - might have said 'the red mist descends! I can regard novelists, musicians, movie-stars and all kind of other creative people with banal indifference - but artists, curators, critics and historians - can make my blood boil with anger or send me into aesthetic fits of elation. You might think that being so passionate about art would be seen as a good thing - but as in other jobs in life there is often a backlash from slackers who resent my snobbishness, arrogance, competitive drive, independence, commitment, and elitism. In the art world I am in the 'who needs him club - but I revel in the role of the underdog. You know, the two key factors in a person's success in the art world - are luck and personality. I had little or no luck and have a personality that has endeared me to few people in the galleries. I simply refuse to talk to artists I dont respect never mind pay them lip service - and as for curators - I simply will not arse-lick or bullshit my way to the top. Most artists flock, like whores around a pimp. When they see an 'important figure in the art world enter the room - I typically walk away. So there is an outrageous self-sufficiency to my art - a complete disregard for the opinions of others. An egotistical and argumentative man when talking about art - I have ruined most of my few opportunities in the art world - through my; overweening self-regard, bitching and querulous nature. I see myself as a martyr to art world rejection and critical disdain - an art world I still firmly believe is populated in large part by people with no real love, knowledge or passion for art. Thus my art, my writings and my photographs reveal an artist of incredible self-importance, self-obsession and ridiculous tactlessness. I have not been interested in compromise in my life - I would rather be a heroic failure than a cowardly success. I have always been an Anarchist - I have ignored the predilections of the rich and famous - and I have lived most of my later life in semi-poverty and isolation. Paul OKelly my first curator said that my work - dramatized the growing pains of the early Irish Free state as it shifted from a post-colonial, provincial, mono-political nation ruled by Finna Fail on the one hand and by the Catholic church on the other - into a prosperous, multi-national, liberal, society filled with youthful optimism and all the vices common to other Western democracies. My paintings also visually documented the 'Yeatsian man caught between the lust for action and the desire for contemplative withdrawal. However more than anything, my art highlighted the anxieties of men in the Western world as they came to terms with female emancipation and their changing roles as men in industry, culture and relationships. I have been fascinated by human Robert Hughes once wrote: "…truly bad art is always sincere," ('Art: Careerism and Hype Amidst The Image Haze', Time, 1985), and my work - was often embarrassingly crippled by adolescent sincerity. My early self-portraits and writings could be laughably gauche, self-conscious and mannered. The life from which my art screamed was; provincial, self-taught, adolescent, anti-academic, anti-art market, unprofessional, willfully eccentric, and egotistical to the point of megalomania. At times I stupidly believed I was the greatest artist of my day, and I believed I would over the course of time become the greatest artist of all time. Yet at other times, I could be plunged into self-doubt, suicidal despair or passive entropy. My doubts about my own ability not only undermined much of my art - it was the instigator behind my auto-vandalistic efforts in paintings like Fellatio (Black streaks) 1992. I needed art like a drowning man needs a life raft, for much of my early life - art was the only thing - which drew me back from the brink of madness and suicide. Only art made my life seem meaningful, worthy of respect and of historical significance. I have no interest in disinterested form - I want everything I make to be unavoidably a product of my hand. I paint only that which obsesses me - that which expresses my state of mind. As a cursed, Expressionist painter, outcast from society, living in isolation with a dark vision so intensely subjective - that it has been seen as beyond consideration within contemporary Irish art never mind world art. The uniqueness of my work has meant that it has had no direct influence on other artists. Thus my deeply personal work has been viewed as mediocre by the art elite - because it relates only marginally to arts broad history. I am sui generis - an artist that cannot be considered in any wider concept of art. I fit into no conventional history of Irish art. I am happy to be a solitary in art. I loathe the rhetoric of social art and would rather be considered a 'non-artist than toe the line. I do not want to form a discourse with others artists - I am proud of my independence. Thus, my work often denies a tangible connection with the world and any potential audience. My painting is ambivalent at best towards modernism, post-modernism and ultra-modernism. My paintings are profoundly pessimistic and out of pace with the optimism, idealism, rhetoric and commercialism of elite art. Yet my personal work is also a part of its era - in ways that are direct, unconscious and thus all the more sociologically illuminating. My approach to art is distinctly literary in character - my work tells stories about the human condition - which most can recognise and read - even if they cant identify with it. I have adopted many of the stylistic approaches of modern art - but used them for more traditional picture making and moral purposes. In my art ugliness and sexual crudity is a token of expressive élan - a means of locating the truth of the sexual self. Although I see myself as an Expressionist artist - many have commented on the deadpan, controlled and highly studied nature of some of my works. Perhaps to some my work is at first sight nothing more than the distasteful product of a clinically insane man - and there is a lot of truth in this view. Yet since many of my images are based upon images culled from popular culture - they are also a product a sick, depraved and hypocritical society. My paintings are typically dominated by - womens faces (their large eyes staring out at the viewer in a mood of lust or aggression), nude bodies, copulating figures, anguished self-portraits and images of men in conflict or tortured agony. My colours and compositions are direct, bold and simple and many of my works are covered in webs of text. Overall my work is confrontational, aggressive, bitter and seething with anger towards the world. My strained nudes express a crude animal beauty and denounce a decadent Western world. However, they are not works of conventional satire, because they lack the wit, moral certainty and political simplicity of true satire - they are too brutally real in their invective. My images of sex are so over the top that they deny arousal. My Augustinian art plunges the viewer right into the fulcrum of sin and evil in order to contemplate its full horror, foulness and hideous guilty attraction. My paintings are full of desperate contradictions - which make the viewer uncertain of what I aim to achieve - debauchery or morality, privacy or public discourse, damnation or praise. My art expresses a longing for a paradise lost - my world before my fathers death and my mothers decent into madness - those happy years when I was destined for a life of greatness and power. Many of my paintings - have been deliberately 'spoilt' by over writing with text, obscured by jabs of paint or swirls of pigment - making clear my contempt for conventional picture making. For me the most important element in a painting is its emotional content - and I try my hardest to hit the viewer in the heart with my art. I never hide my brush marks - I want my work to be as direct as possible - with all its flaws. Thus my paintings - with their thickly applied, raw and strident colours (often taken straight from the tube) have a deeply emotive effect on my viewers who are both seduced and repelled by my often primitive approach to picture making. Paul OKelly believed that I was often at my best and most crowd-pleasing in my small bravura drawings or paintings - in which I said the least. My work over the years has been Tenebrist, amateur-academic, Neo-Impressionist, Neo-Expressionist, text-based, gesturally-abstract, symbolically-abstract, Surreal and Realist. All my life I have only ever been able to paint through the agency of other painters. There has never been a true 'Cypher' painting because there has never been a fixed Cypher identity. Thus I have never been able to settle into one particular style, within which I am completely comfortable and is totally my own. Normally the style of an artist is the unified expression of their personality. But what if the artist's identity is not unified - then you have 'Panic Art' - an art of fragmentation and disunity. I am not one artist - but rather several artists in one. Some may see this as my weakness, but others might see it as my greatest strength. At the heart of my work there is the problem of my identity. Who is Cypher? Who is The Panic Artist? The answer is I am a different person from hour to hour, from day to day and from year to year. I am attacked for not having a single style, despite the fact that the world is full of mindless bores who paint the same pictures of minor ambition in slight variations over and over again, decade after decade and are called 'significant'. So another way of looking at my art is that it is full of invention, stimulating variation, skill, passion and deeply felt emotion. My work displays an explosion of ideas, feelings, stylistic influences, and genres, made without any academic plotting, intellectual theorizing, professional planning, or curatorial calculation. I paint what I want - when I feel like it without any attempt to present a coherent plot to my public. As such each painting I make is like an impromptu entry in the personal diary that is my crazy oeuvre. Each painting I make reflects only my current mood, stylistic inspiration and genre interests. There is no intellectual strategy to my work, only a desperate need to record my psyche in the most visually powerful and immediate of terms. My search for truth in art - has also had an effect on the look of my paintings. Technically I believe that the honesty of my art depends upon an approach that is as direct and spontaneous as possible. That means that I no longer use tracing, squaring up or projecting of the image. It means that when I draw - I hardly ever use an eraser. If I make a mistake in my drawings - I either over draw the corrections or rip up the sheet. In my paintings I paint in a largely 'alla-prima' manner never using glazes and limiting the number of layers I apply. This approach means that my work has a freshness lacking in the work of other painters. But it also means that my paintings often have a rather clumsy naive quality - the result of my technical limitations and the demands I make upon myself to work without a safety net. Because I am fearful of criticism, chronically shy and hate most interactions with real people, about 70% of my work has been based upon photographs - of which about 50% were found in the media. I am so introverted that I have preferred to work indoors, under artificial light, at night, from; newspaper clippings, fashion-spreads, glamour photos, pornographic stills and sports action shots. Sickert, Utrillo, Picabia, Bacon, Warhol, Golub, Richter, Hockney, Morely, Fischl, Salle, Kippenberger, Tuymans, Koons, Hirst and Currin (to name just a few big art star painters) have all created paintings based on public domain images - so it is not really that unusual for me to have done so. (By the way, many readers my find this kind of transvaluation - namely my repeated use of reference to the old and modern masters irritating and self-aggrandising - but as will become clear - this framework of art history is very much how I understand my own efforts). All these artists proved that it is the interpretation of such images - that makes them different from mere student copying. My interpretation of photographs is neither literal nor unaltered. I do not copy photographs - I interpret them! The shock of my work is that I take 'objective mechanical images - often of the most extreme kind - and personalized them. I use them as props, which I manipulated visually to express my individual moods and reactions to such imagery. This was a pre-condition I set on all my 'copies from photographs from 1987 onwards. I do not slavishly stick to the photographic image as Photo-Realists do (my painting 'Country Road, 1988, was one of the few notable examples of dispassionate copying in my oeuvre). Photographs allow me greater freedom in how I chose to treat a subject without the pressure to flatter a sitter or create a good likeness in their view. In most cases, I correct or deconstruct the image in order to create something entirely different. Using ultra-colours and lines that come from my mind and gut. I typically choose emotive subjects - photographed in off-hand, banal, mediocre ways and give them a much bolder and aggressive stylization. The pose of the model and the composition is all I retain. I completely transform the colouring, crop the image, and infect it with my own very linear and expressionist treatment. ('Linear' the opposite of 'painterly' means paintings made with clear, unbroken contours and colours, which create a work of sharp definition. 'Painterly' means, paintings made with a blurred, broken, or loose definition of contour and colour). Like a dark poet of reality - I remake failure images - turning them into revelations of self. Indeed my finest works are those in which I divert from the original the most - imposing on the impersonal mechanical image a formally coherent design, which is an ultra-expression of my own mood - which does not necessarily emanate from the image I contemplated. Thus, it is no surprise - that despite the huge number of photographic, video and artistic sources I use - few are recognisable from the originals. Despite their public sources - they are unmistakably by my hand. It is thus unimportant that photos inspire my art - since what I create is nearly always original and individualistic. Moreover, I do not use found photographs out of an inability to create images of my own. Firstly, I paint numerous paintings based upon my own photographs. Secondly, I create many screen-grab images from stilled video pieces both I have painted large oil paintings that have taken me over 360 hours over six months to paint and small oil paintings that I have finished in a few hours. I have done quick line drawings in less than twenty minutes - and detailed shaded drawings that have taken me thirty hours to complete. The longest straight painting session I have done is thirteen hours. Though the average is more like eight. I tend to find that I dont really get into the zone until the third hour - when I enter a trance like state - working instinctively and naturally. However the flip side to my creative flows - are my painful and depressing artistic-blocks. These blocks come and go - usually only lasting a few days but once (after my first girlfriend left me) lasting six months. The greatest lesson of art history is humility. I did not learn this until I was in my late twenties. Art history is so rich in geniuses, masters, innovators, iconoclasts, prophets, rebels, craftsmen and artisans - that all I can do is try to add something small of my own. Art for me is a journey of self-discovery. It is a realization of my being - in word and paint. In art I create myself. I no longer think I am or could ever be a truly great artist - I just want to be the best version of myself I can be. When I was young, I lusted for glory. Now I simply hope to make a living from my art. I try these days, to live as humble and as gentle a life that I can - which given my egomania - is very difficult. I want nothing much from life. I would like my second half of my life to be more moral than the first half. The Madness of An Art Of Honesty "[Art is] The perpetual immoral subversion of the existing order." Marquis De Sade, Quoted by Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 1971, P91. Sometimes I wonder if my one and only fate as an artist and human being is to be recorded as a case study - to entertain the prurient and those fascinated by the psychology of man. It is my firm belief that my art is so unpopular - not because I am talentless or a Genius ahead of my time - but because my work is so confrontational, aggressive, raw, individualistic - and cruelly indifferent to the fads and fashions of painting, the feelings of women, or the polite conventions and manners of Fine-Art and high-society. It is said that a suffer of a Borderline Personality Disorder can talk with a psychiatrist for over five hours about themselves, and the psychiatrist is still left feeling they do not know the true personality of the patient. My first psychiatrist Dr Anne Maguire, in her notes remarked that I had a, "very unusual personality", and that it "was difficult to have empathy" with me. As a result of my chaotic and traumatic childhood - and my subsequent Borderline Personality Disorder - Whether dressed in women's clothes at eleven, bleeding from the wrists in a para-suicide attempt at twenty-one, wandering from one prostitute to another in Amsterdam at twenty-two, taking copious amounts of drugs in my late twenties, or being angrily rejected by 92 arts bodies - my life was as far from the professional life of a contemporary artist as one could imagine. You dont have to be in the business of understanding the human mind - to realize that my deranged young life - shaped the nature of my art. That is why at least 85% of people looking at my paintings take an instant dislike to my art and to me. They are worried by the aggression, obscenity and egotism of my work and simply will not accept that images of sex can ever be art. My critics are angered by my use of pornography, my politically incorrect views and my arrogant unwillingnesss to bow to their 'expertise. But their anger at my art is nothing compaired to my rage at those I have met in the art world. I have seen billionaire art collectors with the taste of brothel and disco owners. I have seen art buyers with the greedy look of shoppers at Christmas - buying anything and everything without a second thought or even looking very hard at what they are buying. I have seen men and women with real intelligence, knowledge and expertise - ignored, marginalized or quoted but never referenced because their work is not media-friendly. I have seen so-called critics betray their stupidity with erratic and utterly subjective interpretations of art without any philosophical or ethical foundation. I have watched as idiot critics with no particular expertise in anything give forceful opinions on cinema, pop music, design, architecture, fashion, novels, politics, painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, installations and God knows what else - their comments no more illuminating than those of a random person picked off the street. I have seen frantic people at openings - but they were usually elderly women chasing the waiter for doeuvres - not passionate artists engaged in debate. I have seen deluded gigolo painters who live the high life by playing the part of the sensitive artist around rich, influential and desperate middle-aged women. I have seen small petty tyrants thrust their way through the art world armed with nothing but criminal arrogance and egotism. I have seen artists (male and female) sleep their way up the curatorial ladder - skilled in nothing but oral sex and flattery. I have seen talentless artists lauded in the short term merely because they are handsome or beautiful or charismatic. Yet in this world I am the madman! I hate virtually all the art world; the complacent and idiotic art students who live seven years of their life in the safe and supportive confines of academia, the feckless con-artists who spend their arts grants on drink, the chancers who avoid the life long struggle of honing their craft and take up those mediums that any sixteen year old can master, the pretencious 'intellectuals whoes work is supposed to be ultra-smart - yet when caught in conversation are less knowing than a Taxi driver, those who have formed their art into styles If deprived of their comfortable life of well paid lecturing, socially secured exhibitions, arts grants and commercial success - they would stop making art all together. To me they are mere technicians of art. True artists - workaholics, obessives and mavericks - pay for their brilliance by being snipped at by all the little bitches, having their lifes work stolen and expolited by cynical operators and crass gallery dealers - whos only true belief is power and money - not the idealism of creative expression. I on the other hand - make art out of an inner necessity. It is a compulsion - I am fit for nothing else. I revere the past masters of art and have spent days on end studying the art of the old and modern masters in museums around the world. I despise conceptual art and remain outside the contemporary art mainstream. My work explores human fallibility's and emotions - I do not seek to idealise or prettify my representations of people. I have in fact been trying to create a new subject matter for painting - namely truthful expressions of my sexual and emotional life - but few of my fellow-artists, dealers or collectors have been able to accept my brand of tormented and self-exposing erotica as serious art. I have been dismissed as technically inept and mentally unstable - or a hater of women - and I have been hurt and depressed by my constant rejections. I have been attacked for my lack of a single style, the adolescent nature of my work; the obscenity and ugliness of my images, and my personality has been attacked as; arrogant, egotistical, self-pitying and desperate for respect. My personal approach to criticism is to absorb it and learn from it. I do this in order to become more grounded, less egotistical and less self-deceiving. That is not to say that I believe every criticism against me is fair - some of them are not. Nor is it to say that I believe that every criticism of me has been well phrased or well argued - I do not. But I know that the truth of my art - doesnt lie with me alone (this only leads to madness) but within the matrix of public, institutional and critical opinion. To date the result this matrix of opinions is - I am not a very good artist. So be it. But despite my ill favour in the art world, I will not stop making art. Art is all I know and I am unfit to do anything else. Cultured artistic taste has been dominated in my lifetime by academic Conceptualism, and Post-Modernism, while popular taste has demanded illustrative realism of a kitsch pop arty style, neither of which my work has ever been. Cynics have attacked my story of rejection as a myth I have created for myself - to hide the fact that I am just not an artist worth exhibiting. But there is no denying the fact of my rejections and the reaction my work has provoked - which my friends in the art world have witnessed - or which I have seen myself. I may not be a great artist, but my work quite definitely upsets and angers many art world insiders as well as the man in the street. Paradoxically, it has been men in the art world who have reacted with the greatest hostility and even aggression towards my art. Though I think this maybe because many women simply flee from my work in disgust rather than complain. However odd though it seems (with a few exceptions) most of the most fervent and interested fans of my work have been women. The history of human culture is largely a history of religious and political propaganda, commercial vanities, modish twaddle and dishonest and inauthentic expression. Culture is in fact one of the worst places to look for insights into the state of humanity - since it is so censored and riddled with lies, Since the age of thirteen I have believed that the ultimate value of art is the insight it provides upon the human condition. In art even the most horrific aspects of existence like Christ's Crucifixion (Grunewald), hell (Bosch), war (Goya) prostitution (Grosz) civilian bombing (Picasso) sex (Schiele), Lolita`s (Balthus) or madness (Artaud) can be studied from a safe distance and with intellectual and emotional insight. I have believed from my teenage years that art must be totally free to deal with any issue free of censorship, commercial imperatives, or destruction by the state or church. So I loathe the professionalism, of the contemporary artist - their reduction of art to just another branch of opaque; photo-journalism, conceptual reportage, academic navel gazing, teenage illustration, adolescent media goofiness, abstract decoration, or city fun fairs. The vast army of artists worldwide today - has not lead to a battalion of Michelangelo's, Rembrandt's, Delacroix's or Picasso's - instead it has lead to divisions of over educated, under skilled morons - posers who fill art galleries world-wide - with work of no skill, no craft, no visual delight, no real historical awareness, no intellect, no originality and no ambition. Art has been reduced to home decoration for the super rich - and a finishing school for the middle classes. The supposed 'freedom of art is little more than the freedom to say something very small about something very mundane in an obscure manner that only a handful of people actually care about. In a world dominated by the movies, television, the internet, and the print media, art maybe an utterly insignificant activity of little interest to the gossip columnists, media elite and man in the street, but that should not mean that those practising it should so pathetically under achieve. I would coarsely divide the art world into three categories (none of which have any time for my art). Firstly there is the 'High Art' world of the major galleries and museums which promote the work of cutting edge contemporary artists whose work fits into either the history of modernism, the theories of post-modernism or the contemporary concerns of the art-student, artist, curator or critic. To these art world mandarins, Urinals (Duchamp) supposed canned shit (Manzoni), blank white canvases (Ryman) typed lists (Kosuth) dead fish in formaldehyde (Hirst) unmade beds (Emin) or lights going on and off in an empty gallery room can apparently be art - and will provoke the cognoscenti into spasms of philosophical gibberish. But images of two human beings having sex (the source of life, and as Freud pointed out the most significant subconscious drive in humans) can never be art! Secondly there is the crass commercial art world - which panders to the lowest common denominator of the utterly uneducated art collector and common man in the street. The art of these galleries and the auction houses makes up 70% of all the art bought or sold. Most of it is nothing more than wall filler - things to match the curtains and carpet. Finally there is the groundless world of the 'artistic types' many of which - find themselves in Art College. Their only knowledge of art is; fantasy art, graphic design, illustration and other unreal kitsch forms of adolescent illustration. They read comics, are quick to join political pressure groups (though their knowledge of politics is naïve and unrealistic) espouse boneless hippie platitudes and garbled philosophy, draw the same identical adolescent doodles as every other teenager and fancy themselves as creative! To these dilettantes, my elitism, conservativeness and sheer ambition is neither hip nor cool. From the age of sixteen I opted for an inhumanly exiled position from society, one which was - heartbreakingly lonely, economically penurious, devoid of power, and creatively silenced. However, it was a position, which shielded me from the judgements, rules and herd beliefs of my fellow man. As Jean Dubuffet wrote; "For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity." However, mental illness carries a great social stigma impossible to underestimate. Your average commuter on Dublins Dart - is fearful of people with mental illness and avoid those thought to be mentally deranged. Even I have at times avoided certain friends I know who suffer from schizophrenia - not out of fear, but out of a desire for self-preservation. To befriend a mentally deranged person, can result in spending hours dealing with - their delusions and trying to persuade them to seek help. Yet frequently, ones efforts are greeted with nothing but - hostility, denial and bitterness. However they can also be some of the most meaningful friendships in life. My estranged existence with my insane mother made me 'a stranger on the earth dimly trying to understand my existence, the mysteries of love and lust and the nature of society through culture and culture alone. Somewhat like a modern day des Esseintes - the anti-hero in Joris-Karl Huysmans decadent and Symbolist novel Arebours (Against Nature) 1893 - I watched television in silence, looked at paintings in books and in museums, and girls and women on the streets. Put in the position of a voyeur of the world and of women, I feared real human contact and real social situations - which I felt hopelessly out of my depth in. Women terrified me - and even the most banal conversations with them sent me into a panic. So art, literature, cinema television and porn, were the only ways I could enter into any kind of understanding of women and the world. The unusual, perverted and compulsive demands I made on culture to teach me what life could not - led me to the observation that culture was a hopeless, deceitful and unhealthy medium of education. Later, life taught me that an hour in the arms of a woman after a night of courtship, taught me more than a years worth of reading books, looking at films, masturbating to porn or digesting philosophical or feminist texts. The real texture of courtship, love, and lust I discovered - was impossible to truly convey in art. I still believe that art can hint at the depths of human experiences - but one has to have had a life to fill in the blanks. I am acutely conscious of the canon and tradition and like many autodidacts I suffer the manic vice for cultural name-dropping. My tastes were formed by the critics: Rosenberg, Greenberg, Kuspit, Hughes and Sewell. On the one hand I regard the history of art with the utmost respect, loyalty and devotion - but on the other hand I abhor the social and sexual limitations of art - its political correctness, its commercialism, its censorship, its obedience to the dictates of elite's and its tastefulness. My art is the ultimate antidote to Duchampian inspired conceptual art - a powerful relief from over-theorised art - by an artist in love with pictorial pleasure (the line, the brushstroke and the body of the world). In my paintings, I appeal to emotions in order to prompt conflict and shock, but also to engage the public in an intellectual process in which they reflect not on art but upon themselves as human beings. Nietzsche famously wrote that: "We have art to save ourselves from the truth." Like many of Nietzsche's provocative pronouncements it says a great deal about how many people treat art - namely - as an escape from the drudgery, horror and ugliness of life. Leo Tolstoy said that: "Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them…. It is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity." ('What is Art? 1898). While I admire the moral integrity and power of Tolstoys prose and while I agree with this quote - I know that my form of communication is not what Tolstoy meant. Tolstoy in fact would have loathed my art, especially my pornographic art - which he would have attacked as evil and depraved. But then I would have been in good company, Tolstoy in a fit of religious and idealistic piety, attacked Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bach, Beethoven, not to mention his own books. My art would have been too perverted, too aggressive and too raw for his pious mind to take. Indeed the great problem with Tolstoy is the narrowness of his taste and his narrow limitation of communication to that which can be proved to be good (again a highly subjective thing - what can uplift and cure some - can bore and lead to the death of others). But overall I find much to admire in Tolstoy's definition of art. I too have hoped to communicate my feelings of alienation, pain, thwarted lust and love for women in my art - as Kleist said: "…to be understood, if only on occasion, by one other human soul." (Quoted in 'Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, Ingo F. Walther, & Rainer Metzger, P.29, Taschen 1997). To me the antithesis of great truthful art is Kitsch. Though it is not in my opinion a matter of medium. Greenburg broadly defined Kitsch to include; Jazz, Hollywood movies, advertising, commercial illustration and 'Tin-Pan-Ally songs. Personally I loathe advertising but not because I dismiss it as crass, pointless and kitsch (it is of course all of those things) - but rather because it is so skilfully manipulative of the human mind and subconscious. In my view there have been amazingly authentic musicians (Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, Lenoard Cohen, Morrissey and Kurt Cobain,) and film-makers (Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and David Lynch) who have made a high art of their usually debased mediums. But whatever the medium the problem remains - 99% of all culture is inherently Kitsch - namely formulaic, dishonest, academic, plagiaristic, shallow, and hypnotically manipulative. Kitsch is typified by a formulaic approach to production, in which the various real discoveries of the genre and medium are raided for the most successful and pleasing forms, and content. For me there are only two ways Kitsch can be seriously enjoyed - firstly in a knowing and ironic way, and secondly as willing form of escapism from more serious study.
Many philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and writers like Poe and Dryden have insisted upon the link between irrationality and creativity. In literature, the madness of Hamlet and King Leer - have long been the source of debate on the nature of sanity. The list of suicidal, tormented or sacrificed Modernists is a long one; the Marquis de Sade, Goya, Holderlin, Blake, Friedrich, Kleist, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Strindberg, Ensor, Kirchner, Dali, Artaud, Pollock, all suffered from mental illness, or depression. The fate of the modern artist has been to record the fall of man in all its torture. The sacrificial artist has his cousins in the suffering of Christ and the evolutionary theories of Darwin where the fate of the individual is at the expense of the greater survival of the species. Indeed one of the most cogent analyses of van Gogh came from the equally tortured Antonin Artaud, who in his essay The Artist Suicided by Society, made clear that van Gogh's suicide was in fact nothing of the sort - it was a murder! Van Gogh who could not fit into a society who had no use for a man of his virtues and deemed that his death was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of the society at large. However, in many ways, madness is empowering. It is a position I am quite willing to fall back on in times of isolation and stress. As R D Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience; "Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through." From the position of 'madness', the business of art, the art student, the art academic and the art professional with his MFA, arts-grants and collector friendly art works are for me objects of utter contempt and ridicule. What use are any of them to the world? 99% of the art they make, curate, buy, auction, and write about are just a pastiche of a handful of truly original artist's fashionable with historians, art critics or artists. The art world seen from the point of view of madness is just a waste of time, money and human energy. Few of the artists populating the bloated international art world feel any real compulsion to make art and if deprived of arts grants or sales would quickly move on to some other occupation. At art openings, it is a rarity to see anyone actually looking at the art on the walls or talking about art history. Arts main function is social and commercial. Most art is just currency in the stock market of art, or dead weightless theorising in the university. Again as R. D. Laing, wrote in Techniques and Working Methods "I am weary of self-taught painters - self-taught is not taught at all - and the handful here do nothing to support the notion that the virtue of innocence redeems the flaw of ignorance. And I am wearier still of shoddy little scraps, slapdash and unfinished, dishonestly attempting to seduce us with the impetuous charms of the preparatory sketch, so that with a wild impastose brush-stroke here and patches of blank canvas there, we mistake them for urgent and impatient works of genius." Brian Sewell, 'How Ugly Can Faces Get?, Evening Standard, 2007. In this brief introduction to my paintings, I want to take you into the anti-chamber of my art and show you my working methods, my philosophical and emotional attitudes towards making art and finally critique my finished results. There is no point in pretending that I am an easy painter for traditional art lovers to appreciate. My art may appear obscene, violent and misanthropic but it has antecedents in earlier art. From the Obese Venus of Willendorf, to Greek tragedy, and the grotesque pornographic figures at Pompeii, to the demonic sculptures at Moissac and Vezelay, not to mention the haunting miniatures of the Rohan Book of Hours and the phantasmagorias of Piero di Cosimo. In recent centuries, works like; 'Woman Embracing Death' by Baldung Grien, the depictions of hell by Bosch, the crude depictions of peasants by Brueghel, the self-portraits of Rembrandt, Goya`s Capichos, and 'Black Paintings', Messershmidt`s forty-nine Charakterkopfe (character heads) Gericault`s portraits of 'Monomaniacs and his paintings of body parts and severed heads, Daumier`s street scenes, Richard Gerstl's suicidal self-portraits, Kokoschka`s psychological portraits, Egon Schiele`s illegal nudes and narcissistic self-portraits, Dubuffets ferocious nudes and De Koonings 'Woman' series - all form part of the architecture of my tradition. My oeuvre bares all the characteristics of adolescent art; narcissistic self-absorption, bohemian dissent, gratuitous provocation, and fascination with sex. It is the raw in your face adolescent aggression of my work - its arrogance and utter indifference to the opinions or feelings of others - that makes my art so shocking. Moreover, the brutal lack of technical finish and my determination to make art that is unformed, unrefined and emotionally unfettered is often far more shocking than the content of my art. The three major features of my work are; firstly my scrutiny of my own identity, secondly my use of pornography as source material for my paintings and finally my bewildering diversity of styles - which deny artistic maturation, confound interpretation and resist the demands of the art market. My drawings have a strong, confident graphic outline - I know what I want, and what I want to leave out. My drawing and painting style is direct and summary - I make no attempt to hide my brush-marks, and their raw exposure gives my work its emotional depth. I pile up cryptic words, scratchy drawing, wild gestures and lunges of vivid colour. The words come from, philosophy, feminist, media and art books, Indie music and my own wild thoughts. My paintings are a mix of pornographic cliché, mass media hysteria and intimate confession. The originality of my art resides in my complex marriage of socially antagonistic ideas about identity, madness and sexuality with the raw, honest and unintentionally naive techniques of a largely self-taught artist. Much of my art is hasty, raucous and often unfinished looking. My paintings feature abrupt changes in subject, style and medium and I therapeutically pile my work with the written details and collaged artifacts of my traumas, intellectual obsessions, lusts, memories and hopes. Sometimes my work gives the impression that a different hand was responsible for each jolting passage of image and word. Many of my paintings present a series of contradictions, and the simultaneous existence of independent elements, each with equal emphasis, which are roughly fused together by my imagination. Often my paintings feature; painted sub-frames - with critical subtitles which contextualise the images. The diverse elements in my paintings force the viewer to form their own coherent response. In fact, my paintings with their mix of text and painterly passages are activated by the visual and mental exploration of the viewer. My work is rarely joyful, and my line and brushwork, is often driven by a high-pitched drone of expressive victimized and self-pitying complaint. If you want consistency in an artist, you will never find it in my work. Most artists only ever do one thing. My art is not dependent upon a single style or manner. It has many strands. Taking my art as a totality - does not mean that it is all of equal value. There are major works but there are also many minor works of lesser value. However, the cumulative effect gets more powerful the more I produce and the more I complicate things. My paintings are an example of unfettered creativity made selfishly without the restraints of art colleges, galleries, curators or critics. My work is an art of absolute freedom. I have a voracious desire to analyze and reanalyze, cast and recast the world in one style and medium after another. This is not art as a profession - it is art as a way of life. Consequently, I have been criticized for; the varying degrees of conviction in my paintings and my stylistic promiscuity, it has even been suggested that I am too playful, and not serious enough about my development of a mature signature style - nothing could be further from the truth. I am deathly serious about my art. Given the traumatic and fractured young life I have had, it is no wonder that I find working in one style impossible. Psychological demons have haunted me and doubt has crippled me, leading to my fractured styles. Therefore, I have made a virtue of making art, which is a direct and authentic response to the moment. My styles are dictated by the particular demands of a certain subject and how I choose to interpret it. In order to fully visually exploit my subjects - I vary my mediums and supports. I work (not always with the same fluency) in acrylic, oil, alkyd, oil-stick, watercolour, collage, chalk-pastel, oil-pastel, photo-montage, ink, coloured pencils - and chalks on supports as varied as; French linen, cotton duck, canvas-board, watercolour paper, and found objects like; family paintings, a confessional door, a globe, carpet, a carpet-tapestry, mahogany table tops, chair cushions, war maps, photographs, vinyl records and clogs. However, behind my diversity of styles there is the serious underpinning of my study of self, anatomy, sexuality and art history, which unites my work into an autobiographical and professional whole. For me technique is not an end in itself. The production of artfully crafted work of visual delight is fine for others, but for me it is not enough. I want to confront social reality through my art and broaden the socio-sexual and existential grasp of art. I have established my own pornographic library of books. I have moved in Anarchistic, Socialist, Republican, artistic and literary circles and many of my friends have been homosexuals or decadents. I adopt an anarchist attitude towards art and society, seeking out individualistic role models that have stepped outside of social tradition. I set out to breach taboos - set up by mindless social convention - through the freedom of art. My work does not represent a break with the technical tradition of art; rather it is an attack on the sexual and social limitations of art. My work develops by moving backwards and forwards - via a well-considered and multi-layered engagement with the tradition of Western Art. I work in conceptually based series, in which I adopt a particular style, medium and subject which I then pursue through dozens of paintings and drawings. Drawing allows me to express my personality spontaneously through the direct flow of my line in a way that even alla prima painting cannot match. My draughtsmanship is full of hard, thick and sometimes violent lines - which fill my work with drama and depth. Over the years, I have developed a very hard emphatic form of drawing, which is powerfully delineated and replete with forceful hyperbolic descriptions of form and anatomy. My drawing style places an emphasis upon lines and contours as opposed to a more 'painterly-drawing' style - which emphasizes the play of light, shading and tonal masses. In my drawings I arrange my lines forcefully in mainly directional stokes, accented by sharp angles, which give my drawings a dramatic and expressive edge over softer drawing styles. My drawing style is reminiscent of Rembrandt, van Gogh, the German Expressionists and others like De Kooning, Auerbach and Kossoff. Broadly speaking my art fluctuates between a pungent realism and a raw Expressionist treatment. My paintings display the linear brushstrokes of van Gogh, the fragmented flesh tones of Freud, the synthetic background colours of Warhol, the As I have said before - the vast majority of my images come directly from photographs - as a result they often lack the sense of emotional closeness one gets from working from life. I am fascinated by facial forms (cheek bones, dimples, jaw bones, eye sockets, wrinkles) which I highlight and often accentuated in my drawings and paintings in order to reveal the inner psyche of the subject - I approach the head like a lump of clay that has to be mapped to reveal the inner character of the subject. As a result, I frequently over-worked the features of the women in my paintings - making them look craggy, leathery and ugly. I see the human subject not as a morally guided figure but rather as an amoral animal. I was no teenage prodigy, my early clotted and tumultuous canvases testify to this. Many of my paintings - look hard won - and it is a quality I often aspire towards. My paintings are rich in colour and tonal values and sculpturally lit. I establish strong contrasts of light and dark, and vivid combinations of colours. In my figure paintings (which form the core of my art) I break up the planes of faces and bodies into patches of broken colour, in a manner that owes something to my N.C.A.D. life-painting training, something to Cezanne and something to Freud. It is a very powerful and persuasive way to build up a figure. I establish an overall rhythm of lines or brush-marks and I focus directly on the face or figure and reduce the background to a minimum. I paint the figure in close-toned hues with a direct, graphic brushstroke which knits together patches of jaundiced umber's, mauves, steely grays, ochre's, light olives, earthy purples, creams, burnt oranges, dusty blues and subdued reds in order to render the figure in as concrete a manner possible. I often paint the backgrounds of my figures in unnaturally vivid and extreme colours, which viciously jar with the colours of the figures. Virtually all of my nudes and portraits are depicted close-up, the background is boldly suggested - and often reduced to a suggestive abstraction of brushstrokes and clashing colours. I give the face and body full-frontal graphic prominence and most of my figures stare fiercely out of the painting. Often my paintings are painted in thick impasto, which can be compelling for the viewer, even if they suspect my fascination with such crude paint is a regression towards an infantile interest in faeces. My paintings of the nude male or female, have a warts and all documentary style, the surfaces of the bodies I paint are overly determined and overtly muscular somewhat in the manner of Michelangelo or Lucian Freud. My view of life is existential and tragic. Though the core of my oeuvre is my Expressionist, Realist, text and collaged images - my work also encompasses elements of over-painted found objects, language-oriented conceptual art, druggy symbolism and surrealism, and post-modern pastiche. My collages in which there is no hand written text are the least interesting. My best collages are those in which I combined collaged photos with crudely written text. My best paintings are as good as anything that has come out of Ireland in its entire history, but the bad ones, are very much not. Often my work is far too obviously influenced by other artists, especially from 1987-88 by Egon Schiele, from 1990-95 by Jean-Michel Basquiat and from 1995-1999 by Julian Schnabel. Despite producing over four thousand art works between 1987-2008 - in terms of quality my oeuvre is one of the most inconsistent in art history. Only around three hundred of my paintings and drawings reach museum quality standards of originality, conviction, and sheer manifest craft. Perhaps a further four hundred are of biographical and retrospective quality, but nearly a third of them (over 1,700 works) are of such slip-shod execution that they will only ever have value if my reputation is great enough to make them into cult items. Yet an artist deserves to be judged on his best work and there are at least sixty paintings and drawings of mine - which reached world-class standards. So the core of my art can roughly be derived into four major periods: 1987-1990 - My 'Black Paintings' painted in brusque rough brushstrokes in high contrasts of darks and lights. Plus my classical drawings, which displayed; a strong linear style, with bold outlines and sharp contrasts of tone. 1991-1995 - My 'Panic Art' made up of explosive Expressionist paintings made up of angular shapes, simplified drawing, bold juxtapositions of complementary colours (red and green, orange and blue) frenzied brushstrokes, and jammed with text and diagrams. 1996-2001 - Abstract and text images, jammed with text, diagrams and abstract smears of pure colour straight from the tube, often on readymade supports such as pornographic magazine pages, photographs, war maps and other artists paintings. 2002-2008 - Expressive/realist paintings of pornographic orgies, boxers, self-portraits and highly stylised naturalistic nudes and nature studies or text based figurative work. The Panic Self-Portrait
Since all my art was based upon almost total self-obsession - not on a love for anyone or anything else - it was natural that my self-portraits represented the zenith of my art. However this self-love was also undermined by a vicious and sick self-loathing. My self-portraits were egotistical performances the best of which were produced in unrepeatable moments of despair, exhalation or crisis. I have painted and drawn myself in mundane and naturalistic ways. I have painted myself - in tormented expressionist manners. I have deconstructed my mind in collages and text works. I have used my face and figure as an everyman character in symbolic canvases. My self-portraits are not - by any strech of the imagination - conventionally beautiful. They are often technically clumsy (inept drawing, crude tonal values, jarring colours and rough brush work) but they have an unfliching honesty rare in a sub-genre filled with such vain work. Despite their technical limitations - these painting and drawings of myself - prove that great painting is not always about refined skills deployed with reason. My self-portraits were narcissistic forms of self-communication, self-questioning, deconstruction of identity and expressions of my profoundly alienated existence on the margins of society. I began painting my first self-portraits at the age of sixteen, but it was not until 1989 that I began to produce truly ambitious and psychologically insightful self-portraits. My very first self-portraits in 1987 - had a stilted and measured quality missing in my later works. In my early transvestite images the boyish artist and female muse were linked in narcissistic gender-bending watercolours. It should be pointed out, that when I write of the 'Panic Self-Portrait' - I am talking also of the nude self-portrait - since 60% of my self-portraits where in fact nude self-portraits. It was my nude self-portraits that were the most extreme manifestation of my narcissistic exhibitionism and creative wildness. The history of the nude male self-portrait stretches as far back to Durer`s drawing Nude Self-Portrait of 1503/06. Early in 20th century Richard Gerstl and Egon Schiele both created major psychologically charged nude self-portraits - and it was their crucial influence - which shaped my own self-portraits. My nude self-portrait paintings and drawings - were theatres of the self - in more ways than one. In addition to working from the mirror, I also worked from Polaroid photographs of myself and later from stilled video images of myself. From 1989-1991 - I would 'stage' myself screaming, masturbating and despairing in front of my video camera. I would then pause the video and paint from the stilled image. Their psychological record of mental confusion, My early Panic Self-Portraits (1989-1991) were filled with a ferocious hate and threat of violence towards the viewer and towards myself. In them I am consumed by persecution mania and egotistical despair. I challenge the viewer like a destructive anarchistic and madman - a danger to myself and to others. In these passive-aggressive works I depicted myself consumed with narcissistic self-loathing, anguish and despair. There was nothing flattering or precious about my treatment of my own features - I depicted my body stripped naked - pathologically tormented by self-hate and my penis worn raw. Within my self-portraits, I investigated the nature of my identity as it was constructed and perceived by myself. They also recorded my changing sexual image; from my transvestite drawings in 1987, through consciously homoerotic images of myself as a sexual object in 1989, to my slowly maturing, tormented, heterosexual depictions of myself struggling with impotence and fear of women in 1991. My self-portraits from 1993 onwards were less tortured and more playful. At the turn of the millennium - I began to produce ink drawings of myself naked and surrounded by leering and cackling women. Although the subject matter was loaded with psychological torment - the actual works had a conceptual distance, elegance and irony utterly absent in my early depictions of myself. In 2002, I created a series of pornographic watercolours in which I replaced the male porn star with myself - thus placing myself within the pornographic realm. Since then I have continued to periodically produce self-portraits of myself - usually these have been limited to head and shoulders images - full of sadness and resignation. In 2008, I returned to the subconscious fury and pain of my 1991 self-portraits in a new series of psychotic self-portraits I am living in a world were what people think and believe is shaped by the mass media. On the Internet, in publishing, in porn and in the media - sex sells. However, in an art world almost devoid of any aesthetic or social meaning except monetary value, my work is virtually worthless. In fact, I have made far less money from my pornographic paintings than the porn-stars I depict - while receiving just as much hostility from society. However, I do not make art for financial gain, if I did, I would work in other kitsch genres like landscape, still life, bland decorative abstraction, mindless conceptual one-liners, or fashionable pop imagery. The nature of my work can be understood only too well by the common man in the street. I am a radical ultra-modernist who drags life (or at least the sexualized and tormented body) into high art. My work provokes real visceral reactions, that conceptual, video or instillation art can never hope to arose, because fundamentally no one (except the pretentious middle classes and visually illiterate craven modern art collectors) gives a dam about the inane trivial pursuit of contemporary art. In an art world, of kitsch chocolate box landscapes, mindless videos of mundane people, doing boring things, of blank abstract canvases, and pretentious installations of rubbish, I paint the naked human body. There is no anti-art in my work, other than a rage at the pointlessness of what passes for significant statements by a worldwide collective of conceptual academics who can't draw for toffee, and commercial art stars who make virtually identical work, look alike, dress alike, and espouse the same popular political opinions. The extreme subjectivity, perversion and anguish of my work, alienates many of my viewers who cannot comprehend or understand my experiences or artistic message and who see no redeeming feature to my art. I make the viewer adopt the role of a voyeur - in a 'can't look but must look' dilemma of observation. I do not have the ability to communicate with others whose lives are more mainstream than mine, the way that greater artists like Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso van Gogh and Munch have been able to do. I am a pessimist - I believe the world is essentiality evil. I do not have the love for the world and spiritual depth of van Gogh. Moreover I have no faith in art to change anything. Art is not a good enough substitute for the loss of God for me. So I have been unable to turn my self-commentary into universal truths everyone can empathize with. My art like van Gogh's is a cry for help, however unlike the Dutchman, I have been unable to create art of universal appeal and comprehension, my life and personality is too perverse, too hostile and too nihilistic. There is no reaching out to others in my work - instead there is a scream of defiance. So my work often descends into self-pity and self-indulgence.
Until photography - the erotic was a central part theme in Western and Eastern art - streaching back into the mists of time. It was photography and later, stag films, porn-movies, videos and today the internet that abolished arts role of erotic manipulator. In fact most of the early poses, settings and props of early erotic photography was a pastiche of Salon oil paintings. Many artists in history have in periods of boredom, idleness or erotic fever, scribbled erotic imaginings in their sketchbooks - copulating couples, debauched threesomes, lesbian fumbling, and fevered orgies. However, these works have usually been - ruthlessly destroyed by their relatives or executors - fearful that their discovery would damage the artist's posthumous reputation. The prudish art critic John Ruskin's destruction of most of Turners erotic drawings - is just the most famous example of this. So maybe the only difference between me and other artists - is the honesty, courage and recklessness with which I have exhibited these private lusts in public. As a producer of pornographic images, I do not conform to the stereotypes of the Los Angles porn star. I do not have a ripped muscular body, I am not handsome, I am not massively hung and I am not a sexual acrobat. Moreover I have not slept with a lot of women. In fact I have been in two monogamous relationships one after the other, for the last thirteen years. I am not seeking to encourage the use of pornography or promiscuity. Rather I seek to analyze the nature of my desire as a voyeur. I work from 'found' pornographic images (in magazines, on video, or on the Internet) - I do not make pornographic photographic or video images myself. My work is autobiographical in the sense that it records my pathological state and my history of voyeurism - but it does not document my actual sex life - which I have kept private. I have no desire to prettify or idealize women in my art. My concern for visual truth overrides this.
I would like to just quote Will Durant at this point; "Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual…For custom rises out of the people, whereas law is forced upon them from above; law is usually a decree of the master, but custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group…custom remains to the end the force behind law." (The Story of Civilization, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935). I think this quote is very important in relation to the arts and the difference between stylistic outrage and transgressive outrage. For while it seems that the art world can tolerate all kinds of stylistic assaults it cannot act with such objectivity towards art that deals with human failings, customs or sexuality. The former is merely a challenge to Aesthetic Law and fashion - the latter is a challenge to fundamental social morality and good taste. From the age of two I have been a daily masturbator - so sexually based imagery quickly took hold of me. From the age of thirteen - I used erotica as an emotional painkiller. Later I would hunt obsessively for erotic stimulation in bookshops were I purchased books on ancient erotic drawings and early twentieth century erotic photographs - as well as erotic novels by the Marquis de Sade, Miller, Bataille and Nin. I also voraciously read the intimate sexual fantasies of ordinary women in Nancy Friday's compellations; 'My Secret Garden' and 'Women on Top'. I feverishly masturbated to all of these works. At night I would go to my local video shop and rent erotic thrillers - to which I would again guiltily masturbate. Later I went to Amsterdam and haunted the porn shops, pornographic video booths, cinemas and the brothels. I was trying to ease my Seeing the work of Egon Schiele at the age of fifteen convinced me that erotic art could be as heroic and powerful a genre as history or religion. My early explicit paintings and drawings (particularly those from 1989-1997) were created while I was in a pathological state - and in a fury against the censoring of the sexual aspect of existence by the Irish Republican State, Catholic church, Feminists, Socialists and ruling social elites in Ireland. My interest in sex reflected my primitive, uncultured attraction to the magic of the physical. Contemporary pornography, (1970`s-2008), became for me a natural medium for the contemplation of self, being and womankind. My art recorded and documented in text and imagery the powerful affect women's bodies, and sexuality had on my life from childhood. My vision of sex in the early 1990s was in keeping with the morbid, fin-de-siècle torments of Egon Schiele - guilt ridden and nihilistic. Ian O`Doherty in his cynical review of my 'Twenty Years of Panic Art retrospective wrote; "… only an Irish artist could have produced an exhibition like this. Its attitude to sex is remote, distasteful and uniquely Irish… What we see is not, contrary to what some observers believe, demeaning to women. It is simply demeaning to sex. There is no joy in the work…" (Evening Herald 6th November 2000). He was right. I had no desire to produce sentimental paeans to love making. I wanted to depict the, shame, torment, anarchy and darkness of sexual desire. Some of my pornographic paintings were painted with great care, technical sophistication, and mastery of anatomy - a total condemnation to those who would dismiss them as merely adolescent, provocative or throw away. Despite the expressionistic treatment of my pornographic paintings, they remained highly intellectual visions of sexuality. So it comes as no surprise - to learn just how deeply I studied erotic writers like the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. One of my first reviewers Ruth Herrington (TNT: Trinity News Two, December 6th 2000) keenly recognized my kinship with the latter and commented; "Susan Sontag describes Bataille`s work as "an erotics of agony"; Cypher might just be his visual counterpart. He has painted the erotics of agony…."
In my female pornographic nudes, the subject was attacked, not observed. The women were sexually desired, not loved or spiritually comprehended. As Paul Okelly observed - my pornographic paintings had little in common with contemporary artists using sexual imagery like; David Salle, Jeff Koons, The Chapman Brothers, Andres Serrano, Thomas Ruff, or John Currin - for unlike them I was clearly involved and seduced by pornography and not distanced from or ironic towards it. Unlike my contemporaries, I had lived an outcast's existence and I inhabited the world of pornography - I did not make a study of it. In fact, my paintings had far more in common with Expressionist and Surrealist artists like; Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer and Francis Bacon. When choosing my sexual images, I always thought about their psychological impact. At sixteen I produced a couple of images of myself as a transsexual. In my late teen's I concentrated on images of women aggressively kissing men. Later I started making images of men subserviently performing cunnilingus or being fucked from on top by powerful women. Then I made images of male strippers being grouped and leered at by women. When I flirted with homosexual relationships I produced a number of sexy male nudes. Then when I began sleeping with women I produced more images of women performing fellatio on men. However, periodically, when I was at a low-ebb I would produce images of women pissing on men or dominating them.
Philosophically speaking it will come as no surprise that I am against the traditional Marxist and Feminist critique of pornography, popular culture, and the media in general. This left-wing opinion was perfectly crystallized and expressed with verve by John Berger in his seminal book 'Ways of Seeing (1972). Personally I find it an exasperating book - one that I disagree with on a number of levels. But here is how Berger interpreted the female nude in western painting: "One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." Well written, but is Bergers point true of just painting or is it fundamentally true of life? I would stress that it is true of human life as long as visual and written records have spoken of the dance of love and lust. Thus to upbraid male painters for expressing a fundamental truth about men and women is to my mind typical of the lunatic left and their desire to politically correct human nature into something they find more 'just. It also assumes that female beauty/desirability is a powerless state. Again I strongly disagree - in evolutionary terms life is the survival of the most beautiful just as much as it is the survival of the fittest.
When I tell strangers I meet, that I paint pornographic paintings, their responses quickly polarize. There are some who support me, there are some who are indifferent and there are many who are instantly shocked, repelled or verbally hostile. For me to say I paint pornographic images to women is often as disgusting as a woman telling a man she is a prostitute. Women often become guarded when I tell them what I paint - assuming I am a predator and I am going to sexually harass them. Some people haughtily proclaim that they do not see the point of pornography and quickly declare that they prefer the real thing, the suggestion being that only deviants and losers would need such stimulation. Others become irate about the social conditions of those 'driven' into pornography and the way pornography demeans women. Finally there are those who bluntly declare that pornography can never be art. These arguments form the social cant of the public, however I am an outcast and my interest in pornography is not social, religious or political, it is profoundly personal, confessional, artistic, and philosophical. I believe pornography cannot only be art - it can be great art! I have no time for the knowing game of 'shock-art' in which somebody tries to be shocking and someone else tries to be unshockable. I am not interested in cunningly gauging the framework of art and stepping slightly outside it to mock indignation. When I am reading a book - I want to be having sex, but when I am having sex - I want to be reading a book. When I am looking at porn I want to have sex, but when I'm having sex I want to be looking at porn. Actual sex with women is a touchy subject for me. Ever since I was twenty-one and in Amsterdam I realised I was not comfortable in my skin with women. The first two times with prostitutes, I failed to get an erection and it was not until my eighteenth time with a prostitute that I actually had an orgasm! These difficulties I had with enjoying sex were partly a result of my chronic shyness, fear of women, depression and the numbing effects of beta-blockers and anti-psychotic medication. Later when with men and women I again failed to have an orgasm - until I met Helen Black, and even then in a seven and a half year relationship with her - I only came a couple of dozen times. My sex with men was an utter aberration - I never had an orgasm with any man. Male sexual desire is a dark continent, and until the age of mass pornography there was little to culturally record its demonic nature. But even though we now live in a world glutted with images that prove just how evil male desire can be -we have very little to connect it emotionally or intellectually with real men. Apart from coarse and immature jokes about sex, men reveal little about their sexual desires. In the 19th Century it was women who were seen as pathological by psychoanalysts like Freud - but it is now the male condition that is seen as pathologically in crisis. Control of ones intellect, emotions and desire, is the hallmark of male public identity. Men idolize impersonal dead things like the achievements of businessmen, politicians, media celebrities, sports figures and academics. Even 'sensitive' male artists live their lives in competition with contemporary art stars, dead old masters and the weight of the canon. Many men are emotional robots capable of deluging you with trivial facts but unable to say how they feel about their relationship with their fathers or mothers. Most men would rather die at their own hands, than admit to others that they cannot cope and need help. It this that is at the heart of the epidemic of male suicides - which outstrips female suicides by up to fourfold. To be a man who thinks he is worthless and a failure is one thing - but to confess these feelings to others is almost worse than the crisis itself. For many men, the pain of self-loathing - is nothing in comparison to the shame of admitting to others that they feel emasculated. Women threaten male self-control in the figure of the prostitute who arouses disgust and desire and the victim who similarly arouses loathing and pity. Women's sexuality is a constant threat to male self-control. So men often punish women religiously, politically and socially, for arousing male desire, which is so easily swayed by the effects of feminine beauty and sexuality, and women are often blamed for arousing men's 'uncontrollable' sexuality. The battle of the sexes is as old as civilization. Men dominate society - but in personal matters I am convinced women hold most of the cards. Women strike some men as a more powerful and biologically rooted and authentic vision of life, one that has no need to compete and conquer like male identity. Men live their lives not only in fear of women but of each other. They spend their lives competing with fellow students, co-workers, or the lives of media celebrities. Men are not only fearful of the femininity of women but also the femininity within themselves. Men who are too emotional or feminine are ridiculed as pussies, wimps, fags, queers, Nancy boys, and mother's boys. Men are nagged by a constant sense of inadequacy, feeling they need the latest hi-tech gadgets and biggest cars not only to entice women but also to prove a point to other men. Men split women up into Madonna/whore, saint/sinner, wife/slut but the split is never resolved one way or the other. Female identity being so complex that any woman on a given day could be seen by a man to be one or the other. Bitch, whore, cunt, pussy, snatch, gash, beaver and slash are just some of the words used by men and women to denigrate women - as objects of contempt. This contempt for women - stems back to the boy's first break with his mother and the irrational world of emotional femininity, in favour of the impersonal and powerful male public sphere of the father.
Much of male fantasy is caught up in scenarios of sadism, domination, bondage, flagellation and rape, in which male authority is unthreatened and women are "put in their place." Thus men feel ashamed when exposed to exhibitions like mine - as it revels to the daylight the truly demonic and politically incorrect nature of male desire. Men are obsessed with their erectile function and size of their members - apart from porn - penis enlargement gimmicks are one of the most common form of spam on the net. It is well known that of a hundred men who apply to become porn stars - only one or two can actually perform in front of the camera and surrounded by onlookers. In porn videos the camera quickly pans away from the embarrassing sight of a male porn star struggling to gain an erection, and quickly pans back when the member is magically erect again (after being fluffed by a prostitute, aided by Viagra or finally made erect by frantic desperate masturbation). Men are often disgusted by their own weakness when faced by female sexuality. The ease with which a man can be aroused and tormented by female beauty and sexuality threatens male self-control, and their emotionless reduction of the world to dead impersonal objects to be conquered. Porn facilitates male lust and at the same time grants the male voyeur distance, from the complexity of a real relationship with a woman. In some respects porn can be seen as an escape from real women (just as romance novels for women can be seen as an escape from real men) I know in my case it was. Aggressive, grandiose and pornographic paintings like mine can be fatiguing and depressing when seen on mass - making the viewer desperate to have done with it all and move on to something lighter and more entertaining. I have witnessed some women flee from my shows in panic and some men wander through my exhibitions with self-loathing or seething anger at the work. If they do not use porn, they feel guilty and enraged for being part of a culture that produces such images. If they do use such images, they feel ashamed for being so weak as to seek out and pay for such degrading and politically incorrect images of women and men. Moreover they are threatened by my 'phallic' images of powerful male erections or carnal women - most of which they know they can never live up to. Curriculum Vitae. Born Solo Exhibitions 2002 - 'Five Day Wonder' - Exhibition and Performance, Oisin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. Private Collections Newspaper and Magazine Reviews Newspaper Feature Articles Newspaper Notices Radio Interviews Television Interviews Catalogues 2002 - 'Five Day Wonder', texts by Paul O`Kelly and Cypher. 2000 - 'Twenty Years of Panic Art', texts by Paul O`Kelly, Olive Braiden, Donal Mc Neela and Cypher. Artists Writings Related Work Hobbies |
|
| Last Updated ( Jan 26, 2009 at 01:33 PM ) |
"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly."
My paintings, drawings and writings are parallel forms of my uncontrollable need for self-expression. When we look at some other well known other artist/writers like; Vincent Van Gogh, August Strindberg, Edward Munch, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Meidner, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs - we find they too were a bit touched in the head. Edward Tynan (my ex-lover and best friend) wittily commented once that my prose was a cross between the adolescent ruminations of Adrian Mole (the eponymous hero of Sue Townsend`s hilariously funny and cringe making; The Diary of Adrian Mole) and the grand philosophical rants of Friedrich Nietzsche. My art lacks the feel-good factor. My vision is a dark and solitary one. My view of life is grim, uncomfortable, perverted and pessimistic.
Like most Expressionistic artists (Max Beckman being one of the few exceptions) I have found it very difficult to carry the 'cutting-edge' creativity, freshness and power of my early work into my middle age.
I buy clothes very rarely (once a year at 
most). I have little interest in the latest technological gadgets or trappings of middle class life. I cannot drive, I have never owned a car and I never plan to. I spend most of my money on cigarettes, art materials, art books and legal herbal cannabis. What makes me happy? My art, my girlfriend, my mothers good health, my friends, my dog and cats, my home and my books.
Politically I am still an isolationist. I have never voted and have no intention to do so - but if I had to vote it would be for a Democratic Socialist party. I am still an angry elitist in terms of the arts and sports. However socially I am a man obsessed with social fairness. So in conclusion I have shifted from being an extreme libertarian - to a more moderate liberal.
psychology since I was a teenager - when I read the likes of; Zoologist/Ethnologist Desmond Morris, sex experts like Alfred Kinsey and Shere Hite, Psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Historians like Will Durant. In all this reading I lusted after the truth behind human behaviour and actions. That is why I have always wanted to know and record what people really do sexually - as opposed to what they say they do. With great courage and complete indifference to the feelings of others - I revealed all of my insecurities as a man as well as my fear of women, feminism and the world of courtship. My text paintings and especially my Dear Woman assemblages of 1995 dramatized the battle between my adolescent male self and the media and pornographic personification of Woman - I related to everyday through television, advertising, magazines, and videos.
I am clearly more interested in analyzing the structures of arousal than in eliciting it in the viewer or myself. My images of sex have no customary aesthetic beauty or sensuality - yet they are manifestly sexual. It is the ugly sexuality of publicly exhibited anguish, fear of women, and self-loathing. All my pornographic work depicted consensual sex, between actors aged eighteen years and over. I was disgusted by and had no interest in images of child abuse, fetishism, S&M, forced sex or inflicted pain.
I use these sources as a way of reacting to and commenting on the world without participating in it.
from television and my own home videos. Thirdly, I make collages, which create different kinds of visual connections. Fourthly, I paint abstracts based on nothing but my own sketches. Fifthly, I create Surreal images from my imagination and scenes from my life from memory. Sixthly I work from my memory. Finally, since 1989, I have peridocially made many studies from life in all kinds of mediums.
I had no fixed emotional, intellectual, sexual or artistic identity. I was in a state of permanent identity crisis and perpetual artistic stylistic crisis. Moreover I was constantly subjecting myself to examination, making judgements on my past styles and on the ultimate value of my artistic trajectory. There is a lot of anger in me towards the world (a hostility and contempt my mother when paranoid and ill instilled in me) and thus in my art. By expressing that anger in my art, I repel the viewer and provoke their dismissal of my art, which makes me even angrier and more alone.
they think will bring them in money, crass gallery owners with not one onze of aesthic passion (who might as well be selling used cars), unscruplious dealers who get poor artists with even less integrity to knock up saleable pastishes for a quick buck, the slimey alcholic operators who attent every opening - not to look and learn from the art - but to arse lick those in power, the spinless critics incapable of speaking an honest word for fear it will affect their friendships and paypacket, the posuer 'artists who fitfully make art every other Sunday - because they have never had the courage to ditch the day job and really commit to their art - together they make up about 99.999% of the art world. Success in the art world (at least in the short term) is as much to do with charm and diplomacy as talent and vision.
propaganda, advertisement, illusions, delusions and fantasies. Thankfully there are always exceptions, artists and artisans who's work justify the love and belief I have in art - but for every heartfelt religious painter like El Greco, or humanist like Rembrandt, or sensualist like Delacroix, or satirist like Honore Daumier or visual revolutionary like Picasso or tragic abstractionist like Rothko or profound history painter like Kiefer - there is a vast sea of commercial whores, avant-garde poseurs, fashionable opportunists, boring academics, crass amateurs, and talentless crack-pots.
These galleries sell acre after acre of photo-realist kitsch, (the karaoke of painting, mindless mimicry without meaning, personality or emotion) saccharine coloured pseudo-Impressionist canvases (without the urgency, observation, drawing skills or sophisticated colour of true impressionists) and finally pseudo-classical chocolate box canvases (made by mawkish individuals who lack any of the tough drawing skills and fully embodied lives of the true classicists). The art of these galleries is historically redundant, kitsch and fit only for the top of biscuit tins. The artists of such galleries are little better than amateurs, with dim intellects and dull lives, who paint only part time, have virtually no art historical knowledge, and can't draw to save their lives (their 'paintings' are traced from photographs and pedantically filled in with the candy floss colours you find in cheep postcard views). The dealers, collectors and audience for such work, are sent into fits of joy when contemplating images of pre-industrial countryside, kittens in baskets, boardroom portraits of rich capitalists, flowers in vases and sentimental images of children at play. Presented with such images, they talk of how real the images seem, or how much like a photograph the painting appears, or marvel at the tiny details. These people fancy themselves as art lovers! To these commercial galleries there is only one content to art - sales! And my work is virtually unsellable!
Art as such is a form of grand distraction, from the intractable religious, political and sexual injustices of existence. But while I respect Nietzsche, my own attitude to art could not be more different. To me art is the expression of a search for the truth of my existence and the existence of others. And this search for truth conditions many of my responses to art. For while there are many forms of art that I can admire and enjoy - the art I truly adore and turn to in times of real depression is realist and expressionistic in nature. For in the pits of melancholy, when the media world appears to be nothing more than a ridiculous circus populated by stupid attention grabbing buffoons, I seek the gravitates of artists of real integrity, intelligence, sensitivity and originality.
It is said that if someone were given the right to speak freely for ten minutes, people would be horrified by what goes on in their mind - much of which would be classified as; violent, sexually deviant, blasphemous, criminal or anti-social. In art the cliché of the 'mad artist' is widely popular and strongly believed by the common man in the street. What is it like to be mad? Would you know you were crazed, without being told by others that you were? In today's modern politically correct world, labels like 'mad', 'deranged' or 'lunatic' are not to be uttered. But they remain in use in private, against those we dislike and if they are not used in the media, it does not mean that they are not still felt and acted upon by both the man in the street and those in positions of social authority. To many people, I would be considered crazy, at least on the basis of the art I make, the life I have lived and my autobiographical writing that records what I have experienced. Personally, at the time I did not think I was truly 'mad - but my nine attempted suicides, three psychiatric incarnations, six electro-convulsive treatments, sexual perversions and drug abuse - would certainly have deemed me a lunatic in the eyes of many who knew me at the time. Since the age of twenty-one - I have taken anti-depressants like Prozac and Seroxate and anti-psychotics like Melleril and these drugs have taken the suicidal edge off my depression. But what has helped me even more has been the love and acceptance of my girlfriends and the support of my many good friends. I feel very ashamed of my past behaviour - and hope that I will never return to those bad old days again. Part of that process for me is texts like this - in which I try to come to some kind of understanding of my life.
The Politics of Experience; "What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, interjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical 'mechanisms.' There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically 'normal' forms of alienation. The 'normally' alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the 'formal' majority as bad or mad." What Laing wrote of society is just as true of the art world, which is governed by an elite - which proscribes just what is and what is not considered art.
At heart, I am an Expressionist artist; my art is the very opposite of 'arts for arts sake', in fact I see no separation between my art and my life, both feed from each other to form a highly autobiographical art. I am remorselessly self-critical and my work is obsessed with the 'self' and the 'other' represented by the world. The fiction of me as a primitive outcast exploding with painterly rage, remorse, and anguish fuels my art and forms its identity.
motifs of hardcore pornography, the conceptual graffiti of Basquiat and the abstract biomorphic interjections of Schnabel. I value the experimental process of drawing and painting - and try to keep my work as open ended as possible. I often make detailed and laborious paintings but I prefer to make, deceptively simple and swiftly executed bravura works with a primitive edge. I have been known to produce up to ten paintings or up to forty drawings in a single day. In fact - art dealers have often criticized me for producing too many slap-dash studies - and not enough major oil paintings on canvas. Typically, I start with a realist image and then develop it in a more abstract or purely expressive way. Drawing's, sketches, worksheet's, collage's and small-scale works on paper form the backbone of my art, and with them, I obsessively pursue my various subjects; self-portraits, female portraits, nudes, night-club scenes, pornographic images, abstractions, and text based work.
the viewer - far stronger than its formal or technical aspects. Thus the content of my paintings is absolutely vital to me. Subjects are not just a pretext for my paintings but their raison d'être. Virtually all my paintings aim to communicate an experience, a desire or fear, a loaded sexual subject or have a deep autobiographical meaning fully known to me. My work always evolves from the line and from the principals of draughtsmanship. For me drawing always comes first - so only after I have established the correct drawing do I move on to painting. Before I start any painting I establish in my mind its colours. Only when I have an idea of what colours I will use in the figure and background do I start painting. This quasi-academic approach to painting underpins the emotional explosiveness of all my work. In my best work the marriage of self-taught academic technique and emotional intensity leads to powerful and iconic work. But if one or the other dominates my work sinks into insipid realism or out of control illegible emotionalism. The range of different mediums and techniques I use all share a concern with the identity of craftsmanship, form and the varied ways in which a visual motif can be expressed through different mediums, scales and execution.
"Individualism, like liberty, is a luxury of civilization… freed from the burdens of hunger, reproduction and war to create the intangible values of leisure, culture and art." Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935.
They recorded my battle to understand myself - and the world around me. There was nothing understaded or modest about my self-examination. There was nothing sensual, spiritual or erotic about my frequent nakedness in these paintings.
psychic decay, depravity, alienation and crisis made these works so powerful - and outside of the usual rules and subtleties of academic art. Later in mid 1991, I started to depict myself attempting to cut my wrists, throat or penis. In fact from 1987 to late 1991 there was a slow escalation in the violence of my self-portraits - both in what I depicted myself doing and in the ways I chose to stylistically convey it. Moreover my self-mutilation paintings of mid 1991 - anticipated and preceded the actual cutting of my wrists in late 1991. However, in a way a perverse way - the paintings of me attempting self-harm - briefly purged the desire from myself. In later years my lovers like Helen and Carol would laugh when they looked through my photo albums - which were filled with photographs of me. "You love yourself dont you?" They would giggle. They knew I did not love myself but they could not fathom my self-involvement.
on the brink of madness.
As I have hinted at already - for me the professional lives and intellectual observations of most artists are utterly worthless. My only concern is to record the state of my existence and in some way to comment upon the immoral and debauched lives of modern men and women. I believe in the concept of the modern artist written about by Susan Sontage, in her essay 'The Pornographic Imagination', (1967): "His principal means of fascination is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or seems to be, not wanted. But however fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience, his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience's sense (whether something known or inferred) of the outrages he commits upon himself. The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness."
The one major subject my paintings should have represented was my childhood abuse at the hands of my mentally deranged mother. But these memories were so raw, hurtful and uncontainable by art - that I was rarely able to bring them out of myself. Porn became a surrogate for the feelings of fear, anger, awe, disgust and lust for women I had grown up to view at a primal level as objects of abject terror. My porn paintings are appropriated 'ready-mades', expressively distorted and interpreted by me. The images do not represent my own particular fantasies - instead they represent the mainstream commercial fantasies of the hardcore pornography industry. However, as expressive paintings they do represent my own real emotions in relation to images of sex. My pornographic painting, are frequently painted with great care and technical sophistication, a total rebuke to those who would dismiss them as adolescent, puerile or merely provocative. The main activities shown in my pornographic paintings are; two adult men with one adult woman, two adult women with one adult man, orgies, fellatio, cunnilingus, sodomy, and Urology (water-sports). I pick my pornographic images, for the beauty of the actresses, the sexiness of the sexual act depicted, the compositional quality of the form and finally the psychological impact of the image. My treatment of sex is full of fear and anger.
depression, loneliness and fear of women with the quick and easy fix of pornography and prostitution. However, pornography was never a simple form of hedonism for me. It was always tinged with guilt, shame, loneliness and self-disgust. Wandering around porn shops in Las Vegas, Paris, Amsterdam, London and later even in Dublin - I felt a victim to my sexual compulsions. My use of porn was part of a depressive loop - starting from a position of isolation, loneliness boredom and depression I used porn as a painkiller, which could numb and distract me as well as give me a short moment of phallic power. But after my orgasm I was plunged back into self-loathing, shame, loneliness and isolation. Using pornography I felt like a loser and sicko - unable to court real women - and forced to lust after victimized but also exhibitionistic, decadent and lewd women who were fucked by alpha male pimps, thugs and professional porn studs. In the real world I knew these 'street-wise' women would eat me alive and leave me for dead. However, in reproduction I could fantasize that they desired my nerdish nine stone body and found my adolescent bespectacled face attractive. Moreover in pornography, my performance anxiety was cured. In pornography I was always hard, always came on time, I was always desirable to attractive women and they sought to willingly give me pleasure.
As a young artist I was drawn to what Linda William's in her key book 'Hardcore' described as 'the frenzy of the visible' on which she said the following; "The self-conscious control and surveillance normally exercised by the "properly" socialized woman over her appearance, and so evident in the soft core "turn on", is precisely what the hard core wants to circumvent. Hard core desires assurance that it is witnessing not the voluntary performance of feminine pleasure, but its involuntary confession. The womans ability to fake the orgasm that a man can never fake (at least according to certain standards of evidence) seems to be at the root of all the genres attempts to solicit what it can never be sure of: the out of control confession of pleasure, a hard core 'frenzy of the visible. The animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema might therefore be described as the (impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in a female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured… The unwilling victims eventual manifestation of pleasure are offered as the genres proof of a sincerity that under other conditions might seem less sure." Linda Williams Hard Core (P.50).
My attitude towards pornography these days is far more jaded. It simply does not have the hold on my imagination that it once had. I continue to create pornographic work, but it is a small percentage of my overall production. Moreover I have no illusions that my art is going to change society - the way I did as a youth. However I still believe that sexual fantasies, erotica and pornography, like art and psychoanalysis are therapeutic. Pornography in my opinion, gives much need relief to many socially isolated men, aids married couples, and liberates intellectuals who seek to end hypocrisy and the poison of cultural lies about the body, gender and desire.
I am not a family man - so I do not have to suggest I am respectable. I am not a politician - so I do not have to pretend that I can end social injustice. I am not a religious man - so I do not have to delude people that there is a god, a universal moral order and that people are essentially good. I am an outcast artist - all I have to do is honestly express my existence through my craft and intelligent response to the world I see around me especially in the bombardment of media that engulfs us. Fundamentally, I still believe that almost any subject is valid for art - but whether it is good art depends on the skill, originality and understanding of the artist. Moreover I believe that pornography can be made with a moral agenda as Angela Carter suggested in 'The Sadeian Woman (1979): "The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he enters the realms of true obscenity as he describes it."
I am not gay, I am not sexually attracted to men and I do not fantasise about gay sex. However, at the time I was so lonely and fearful of women that sex with men was the only way I could feel loved. When having sex with women I am often more concerned with giving pleasure to the woman and making her have an orgasm since, I know it is so hard for me to come. Conventional missionary sex bores me - I am far more interested in having the woman on top, I love giving cunnilingus and receiving fellatio even more. I prefer being in charge in bed and enjoy giving mild forms of discipline and rough sex - but I dont enjoy receiving it. When having sex my look towards a woman has been noted to be a cross between fear and anger. I have always suffered from problems with erections, having orgasms, and matching the high sex drive of women I have been with. It is a really raw subject for me. I would love to be able to get an erection on demand, come exactly when I want to and have sex all day, every day. But I just can't. Its not that I prefer pornography to sex. It is just that with porn I never have performance anxiety, I don't have to worry about not getting an erection, or not coming, or not wanting to have sex, because its just a porn video and its not going to judge me or make me do anything I don't want to do. I suppose its hard for a woman to understand this but my performance anxiety is as big an issue of self-esteem for me as a woman's weight, beauty and desirability would be for her. It has absolutely nothing to do with the woman I'm with - or how beautiful or sexy she is - its all in my fucked up and frightened head. That is why it is the intimacy and shared special moments in a relationship that I cherish over any sexual activity. Moreover, while I could live without sex in a relationship, I could never live without the kisses and cuddles, which soothe my soul, and form the true bonds of love.
Many men - in all kinds of fields from ballet to boxing - have an inbuilt irrational desire to be the best. To be winners. To be powerful, respected and desired. Weakness is for losers. In politics, business, religion, sport and public life it is men who hold centre stage - wives, girlfriends and family members exist only as props for male power. Men shun altruistic and caring professions like nursing and tend towards impersonal occupations like banking. But in the world of media, glamour, fashion, and pornography it is women who hold sway and men are mere mannequins in the background. In heterosexual pornography, male faces and male identities are almost invisible. While every part of the female body is displayed and worshiped by the camera, the male actors are reduced to walking dildos, present merely to take the place of the male voyeur in his imagination.