I suppose artistically speaking I've always had a fascination with anything which is (can't quite find the word) complete, totally of itself, a self-contained environment which may often (although this is not necessarily part of the appeal) appear quite extreme to the outsider. I don't mean "I like this sort of picture upon my wall" so much as something which might almost be termed a thought process through which one can take an alternate view of the world, not necessarily to adopt that view but more for the sake of perspective. Anyway, this is what initially drew me to the Italian Futurist painters. Particularly Fortunato Depero - one of the less publicised later members of the expanding group whose reputation (despite a recent resurgence of interest) has been somewhat unfairly tarnished by associations with Italian fascism. Well, he wasn't, and these things don't always deter me:
There we go. It's fun, colourful, childish, brash, excitable, accessible and yet somehow absolutely without compromise. And that is what started me painting in earnest, at least beyond the level of the usual pictures of skulls and space rockets I'd churn out at school. Happily I discovered that the skills of Velasquez were not necessary in order to produce my own Depero inspired efforts (haven't photographed them yet so you'll have to use your imagination I'm afraid) and thus I managed to get through art college without developing any conventional representational drawing skills (or "talent" as it is sometimes termed) - I'm being sardonic here by the way.
I've always felt kind of rootless, like I didn't belong any place in particular, and I suspect that most artistic activities I have pursued have represented an attempt to either define myself (sorry - getting a bit Oprah here I know) in terms of something with a strong sense of psychological territory, or even to just plain create my own private universe. It's probably a power thing. When I was a kid I used to read a comic strip called Halo Jones written by Alan Moore. The third part of this epic saga begins with a resume of Halo's activities following the end of part two, crap jobs on various planets spread across the galaxy terminating with a sentence equating to it was as though she was prowling around the universe like a caged animal looking for a way out, and I remember this made a huge impression.
Fuck, I thought, that's me!
So anyway, years pass and the pseudo-Futurist paintings begin to include oddly incongruous images of ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses - not an entirely successful experiment but something about the culture (or at least what I understood of it based on twenty pages in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology) really appealed to me: that self-contained (or maybe self-consistent) universe thing again. It was like a need for (for want of a better word) a near religious sense of environment without actually wanting to pull the wool down over my own eyes and fall for something that contradicted common sense or the laws of physics. Not sure why I was quite so picky though considering all the other crap I used to fall for hook, line and sinker at the time.
Anyway, the painting burned itself out. I got into a rotten relationship and sought escape in Doctor Who novels (sorry.... should have pointed out that I was never really a high culture guy despite my best intentions) and thusly did I come across this:
As it happens, Kate Orman can be a pretty damn fine author when she makes the effort, and this was good enough to instill an emergent fascination with Mexico. It was the first time something had grabbed me like this since the Futurists and within a week of reading The Left-Handed Hummingbird I had got myself to a library and read enough to realise that, despite Kate Orman's research being far more diligent than one would normally expect of what is basically well-written pulp fiction, she hadn't gone that deep, and there was a lot more to the subject. It suddenly felt like a lot of things had all converged at once and (I make no apology for the rest of this sentence) at last I had purpose. I was no longer prowling around the universe looking for a way out.
I threw myself into reading up on the subject, for the first time reading proper books by proper authors, things that do more than just kill time between TV programmes. The more I read, the more absorbed I became until I reached the point where I was beginning to notice contradictions, or even find certain claims which I in my arrogance considered might have a better explanation. It's very hard to describe but it felt like I had come home at last. The Egyptian thing had, like most other things, grabbed me as a passing interest, but it was nothing like this. So much that I read about Mesoamerica just seemed to make perfect intuitive sense. It had nothing inscrutable, nothing which (like the Egyptian phase) felt like material borrowed from a foreign language. I was feeling that shit, as 50 Cent would say.
So it got to the point where I began to take notes, then set down my thoughts and observations, my own perspective - and often this would be rewarded by the find of some new text which would actually state some idea I had already developed of my own volition. Man, I'm good, I thought with growing excitement.
Ultimately of course I found that there is only so much one can learn from the material available in your regular bookshops, and so rather than start buying those really expensive things from Foyles which would probably be a bit boring - Thirteenth Century Mazahua Sanitary Researches and the like - I returned to painting. I'd built up a goodly head of obsessive steam and I needed to get it out. With hindsight I would regard it as 'intuitive research', almost an attempt to think in Mesoamerican terms. If you want to call it ritual, please be my guest.
Since the Futurist paintings I'd spent some time as an underground cartoonist in an attempt (a failed attempt) to make a bit of a living at something other than the day job. Robert Crumb / Bill Griffiths inspired strips mainly, and good for a few sardonic chuckles, plus also it taught me how much I had yet to learn about representational art. Good job the jokes worked because my figures were fucking dreadful. Never did life drawing at art college. They had nude ladies and I was too embarrassed. Hence the Doctor Who books I guess. Sigh.
Okay. By this time I had grown to despise dilettante tendencies, not least my own dilettante tendencies, just dipping into something as a means of passing time. All or nothing, I thought and still do. So I laboured over a few of these new Mexican paintings and soon realised I was falling into the old trap of running before I could walk and just striving for something that looked kind of cool. I went back to the drawing board and stepped up the reading and writing to an exhaustive level, setting down page upon page of notes and observations before painting. Through this process it became apparent that in order to be true to the subject I would need to attempt to paint at least partially in the language of that subject - something from the inside looking out rather than just another predictable Western take on feathery Freddy Krugeresque Gods as a horror device, this being where Kate Orman screwed up.
Well, I wasn't born in fifteenth century Tenochtitlan, I realised, so it might be a little dishonest to pretend otherwise, and with an aesthetic developed in Futurism and cartoon strips I might be best starting off from what I knew whilst striving to elevate my art beyond these origins, to elevate it towards something approaching religious paintings of previous centuries (Delacroix, Velasquez, those other guys). If anyone knows what the hell I'm talking about at this juncture please feel free to point it out to me.
Ultimately, and without really wanting to bore either you or myself completely shitless with a step by step breakdown of my progress, I began to conceive each painting as a sort of map, with each part of the painting carrying specific potentials according to the symbolic import of each of the five directions of the Nahua universe - thus East (at the foot of these paintings) tends to refer to origination; North (the right) to death, cold; West (the top) to fertility; and South (left) to penitence and sacrifice. This by the way is a somewhat simplified description, as the rules I've imposed have undergone subtle variations as each painting demands, but the crucial point is to remember that the aesthetic is built upon a (hopefully) consistent framework of symbols that runs through most of the paintings even if it is not always directly expressed. The entire Nahua-Mexica mythology seems founded upon an underlying fixation with balance and symmetry, and I have tried to use this as a foundation upon which to build these images.
In keeping with this need for symmetry, for my reluctance to avoid anything arbitrary, I ended up producing 104 paintings in total (52 male Deities and 52 female Deities - both 52 and 104 being multiples of 13 and thus ritually significant numbers in Nahua lore), ostensibly for a mammoth text comprising both paintings and pages of my notes turned into essays with most of the bottom jokes taken out. I'm still not too sure about how this will develop, although a large number of new versions of the 104 paintings were produced after finishing the initial series, then realising that some of the earlier efforts now looked shite or were rendered symbolically inaccurate by my improving artistic abilities or understanding of the subject. I have a horrible feeling this is one of those Forth Bridge things - I'll never finish until either I die or every last one makes even the most epically Biblical renaissance master look like a jobbing Sun cartoonist.
Oh... here's my painting of the big yin, himself, Huitzilopochtli. Just look at the meaningon that!
Note use of pertinent pictograms in appropriate directionally orientated parts of the picture. I like images that make you work, things with a language of their own which invite you in and reward you if you make the effort to figure it out.
So where are we? Well I'm pretty much out of words. Ye oyauh in notlatolhoaz, as the mighty Ahuizotl himself may once have said - my talker has run down. I'll save anything else for a discussion of the paintings in the gallery ("we're sorry we can't return your paintings but Ishtar does give a prize for every one she shows") but end on one note that probably means I'm bonkers and you should disregard anything else I say ever. This process of producing these paintings felt very much like defining something (see earlier), calling something into existence once again, bringing something back to the world. I believe in science and physics and I do not believe in a big sky daddy or woodland goblins, but for reasons I will go into later I can find little in Mesoamerican culture which contradicts any of this, at least once you look a little deeper. Irrespective of whether I am depicting (or even calling back) something that is real, the ideas themselves are real and that for me is the thing to remember.
