WHY?

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’).

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.