<![CDATA[<body>
<p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Welcome to the Ashley
Thorpe Homepage: </strong></font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">You are seeing this page
because you do not have frames support. </font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>WHY Art and not
a sensible job</strong>? </font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Because I love (and want
to love) what I do. There, that simple. But there are other reasons. In dreams
begin irresponsibilities. That’s why I love art, because at least there in a
world of fictions everything is possible; landscapes can mutate with a brush-stroke,
anatomies reconfigure on a whim. In a wash of paint, exchange of pixels or grain
of film stock anything can happen. Whole world’s can become functions of your
vision. There are no limits. If you want reassurance look to religion or science,
art is meant to disturb. Art should be transgressive. Children for example are
naturally transgressive; perhaps that’s why they draw and why the imagination
plays such an important role in their lives. And before we get too high and
mighty about this let’s pause to consider the extent that the imagination plays
in our lives. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we dress the way we do?
We imagine. Art is a tool of the imagination. Art should be about exploring
possibilities. It should provoke questions. It should provide a choice. And
though its crimes are committed within the safe precincts of the imagination,
for the people who choose to be the imaginations representatives, the forbidden
becomes something protected. Art should be as free from restraint as thought
itself, obsessions followed like stepping stones. Obviously within a market
place havens are few. It’s difficult to survive as an iconoclast. For an artist
to survive he or she has to communicate. They have to be resourceful. They have
to be cunning, perhaps amoral, in the pursuit of their projects. Artists and
criminals share certain characteristics I think. Not only does art allow you
to ‘disobey’, ignore or mock the world’s conventions, but it can also allow
you to side-step certain hierarchies…and done right it can pay well. We spend
one third of our lives asleep… Just think about that for one moment. Quietly,
safely insane in our beds… That’s roughly 20 years of the unconscious and investigations
into it. All that time spent swimming around in a pool of not only private images
but I believe shared stories that quite possibly all humanity is heir to. Now
the artist dealing in works of the fantastic or the surreal is uniquely placed
to investigate this pool of hopes and fears and dramatise their eruptions into
our everyday lives. If my enthusiasms are not rooted in a particular medium
it’s because I’m more interested in the act of pulling these images to the surface
and communicating an idea. I paint and write to explore the worlds between my
ears. Quite often the stories and images will come without invitation, but the
motivation to respond is always the same. I want intimacy with this secret landscape
and I believe that art, especially that of the imaginative, is one of the best
tools for mapping it. In the last ten years I’ve worked in a variety of mediums
in various styles for a disparate series of clients. I exhibited a series of
abstract oils then illustrated a book about serial killers (‘Better to Reign
in Hell’, Critical Vision). I created graphics for the BBC (‘Weird Almanac’)
and for Derren Brown’s ‘Trick of the Mind’ and then painted a comic strip for
‘?????’ in Athens (‘Pictoria’). Though disparate a line ran throughout. As a
child I taught myself to draw by copying comics, then like many fans of the
genre was dissuaded to follow that path while in art college. Fantasy, comic
illustration especially, will always be sneered at as an illegitimate art. And
yet in many ways I’m glad that I had that conflict, glad that I was bullied
into learning the conventions. Because ultimately it just meant that I found
the same dark fantasy tradition by another route. By being told that art of
a fantastic nature was illegitimate I sought out the same strain in ‘legitimate
art’…and guess what. It’s there aplenty. Suddenly the leap between Giger and
Bosch, Manga and Blake didn’t seem so great. I suddenly realised that it was
perfectly reasonable to adore both Goya and the work of Maurice Sendak. Legitimate
or illegitimate was irrelevant; all I knew was that history was littered with
its children. It’s not a popular way of thinking. People like to categorize
and put everything in little boxes (the same people who will tell you that ‘Psycho’
isn’t a horror film, it’s a ‘thriller’). And this ignorance applies to both
sides in this debate. You have as much chance of finding books on Goya at a
comic fair as you do finding Frank Miller at an exhibition of expressionist
woodcuts. The mainstream will always claim material culled from peripheral genres
and deny its sources and their legitimacy. It has always been this way and,
unless advocates of the peripheral start making the connections and cross media,
nothing will ever change. There’s nothing wrong with tradition; in fact it has
a very valuable purpose in terms of signifiers. The work of Alan Moore, ‘Watchmen’
and ‘League of Extraordinary Gentleman’ are prime examples. Tradition is a guideline
to what people expect, and by understanding that and subverting it, you can
subsequently give them something that will surprise them. A thought… “If there’s
a God right, and like everyone else He needs a computer to keep things in order,
how much stuff do you think gets caught in his spam filters? I mean maybe the
reason things are such a mess are because God’s spam filters are too strict.
Do prayers end up in the junk mail? How often would He check it? What with all
the internal mail, gossip from the cherubim and filthy j.pegs from hell, how
would He find the time to look at all of it? Maybe that’s how it all ends these
days…all our hopes and prayers, languishing in the junkmail folder for 7 days
until deletion…” Biography Ashley Thorpe was born in Inverness in 1972. Any
relation to local monsters has since been disproved. After a family relocation
to the West Country and attending local schools he studied film and fine art
in Canterbury. It was here that he met Mick Grierson, Mark Stevens and Ben Burgess,
friendships that would later result in the ‘Sharkitekt’ audio / visual art collective.
Encouraged by their first films winning the Kent open film award and being nominated
for the Sky scholarship they progressed to promotional videos and documentaries.
(The collective is still going strong. See www.sharkitekt.com for details).
After graduating with a first class degree Ashley moved to Manchester wherein
he not only found work at BBC Manchester, creating sequences for their ‘Fortean
Times’ inspired BBC / Learning channel venture ‘Weird Almanac’, but also created
an ongoing friendship with David Kerekes of ‘Headpress’ / Critical Vision publishing.
After a number of commissions Ashley moved to London to develop a series of
Sharkitekt projects (including ‘The Vampire’ animation recently shown at the
6th Indy Panorama festival in Thessaloniki, Greece) and continue work upon his
first novel ‘Junction’. In recent years Ashley has lived and worked in London
and Athens working on projects as diverse as graphics for Derren Brown’s ‘Trick
of the Mind 2’, various film projects as assistant director / art director and
a comic strip for ‘?????’ Athens. He lists amongst his influences the work of
William Burroughs, David Lynch, Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, William Blake,
Louis le Brocquy, Dave McKean, Francis Bacon, Goya, Frank Miller, Eno era David
Bowie, Greek myth, Enki Bilal, German Expressionism, surrealism, horror movies
and Manga. Selected Filmography (Created with Sharkitekt unless otherwise stated)
1996 – ‘Threshold’ Video (with James Harrod) 1997 – ‘Darker Landscapes’ Video
1998 – ‘Remain’ 16mm film animation 1998 – ‘The Tissued Corridor’ 16mm film
1999 – ‘Ariel’ 16mm film with digital sequences 2001 – ‘Remote Control’ sequences
for Mick Grierson 2002 – ‘Weird Almanac’ – sequences for BBC Manchester 2004
– ‘Words and Sins’ –for Vasilis Masomenos. 2004 – ‘Mudlark’ – for Mick Grierson.
Digital video. 2004 – ‘The Vampire’ – Digital animation </font> </p>
</body>]]>