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The Erotic`s of Agony, The Art of Cypher - The Panic Artist. A Life of Madness, Sex, Pornography, Drugs and Modern Art
“I am the
only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.” “You’re obliged to pretend
respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached
in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn,
and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between
your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses
of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In
that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of
personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check
the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound
of the civilized world.” "That is why Van Gogh died suicided,
because it was the concerted awareness of society as a whole that could
bear him no longer… Besides, one does not commit suicide alone.
No one was ever born alone. Nor has anyone died alone. But, in the case
of suicide, a whole army of evil beings is needed to force the body to
perform the unnatural act of depriving itself of its own life."
Introduction '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
gather 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. I am a thirty-six year old (b. 1971) Irish 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 years
worth of paintings and drawings. 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. 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 e70,000 of my own money on art materials, over e8,000 of my own money on art books, meanwhile I used my own money to travel to see art in L.A., Paris twice, Amsterdam six times, London twice, Barcelona, Madrid, and Cork four times. I produce paintings in acrylics, oils, watercolours, and mixed-media, I have also produced many collages and countless drawings in many mediums. To date my oeuvre contains over 2,300 paintings (acrylics, watercolours, oils, mixed media, pastels or collages) and over 2,300 drawings (pencil, ink, coloured pencils, conte, or charcoal). I have also written two texts; The Panic Artist 672pp and The Panic Texts 293pp) - which total 942 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 sold over e37,550 worth of art. The highest price paid for one of my works was e10,792 (The Dialectic of Emotions 1995 - sold in the Oisin gallery in November 2000). Though the average price for one of my works has been around e500-e900. I have also received e1,400 in 2005, for the film option rights to my autobiography The Panic Artist. 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, Rembrandt and Willem De Kooning. Technically there are many contemporary academics and neo-salon painters who are more skillful practitioners than I am, but the power of my paintings comes from their directness, energy, and willful shattering of taboos. These days I am highly self-critical about my art and myself – some of my friends would say I’am too self-debasing. I appreciate their support – but I would rather he thought of as too hard on myself than too vain or proud – those thoughts only lead back to the bad old days of my youth. I am the acme of political incorrectness - a white, male, western, provincial, 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. In my work I may have sought to speak out against shame and hypocrisy. But this has only led me to have to defend my art and life constantly to curators, family and friends. Of course shock for its own sake is worthless aesthetically and philosophically. I aim to create more than shock - 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 work is an anti-social, solipsistic, explosion of uncensored desire, and unregulated emotion. In my art and writings, I bare my soul to the world. My early life was fractured by, death, madness, perversion, unhappy love affairs, and rejections from the art world - my work inclines towards pessimistic nihilism. I suffered badly from an Oedipus complex (an inability to break my dependency on my mother) well in to my mid twenties. My signature and the date of my work is signed strikingly in large capital letters in the corner of nearly all my paintings and drawings - a sign of my huge ego and need for recognition. I have worked in such a variety of mediums, styles and in such quantity that it could be assumed that my oeuvre was the product of half a dozen men. I live a reclusive hermitic life by choice. I rarely visit friend's houses
and prefer my friends to visit me. I am highly elitist, critical My view of existence is bleak and unforgiving. 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 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. It is only through art that I can give my life any sense of meaning or existential value. People who don’t 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 art or depression)
I have chosen to be by myself. In fact I much prefer being alone in my
house with my girlfriend and my dog and cat – than socializing with
others in town. However my friends when they do see me - say they appreciate;
my honesty, my loyalty, my intelligence, my open-mindedness, my 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 and
surreal humour, my love and support for my mother and my fondness for
my pets. In fact some who have befriended me thinking I was some kind
of Anarchistic Drunken Punk – have been shocked by my reserved,
genteel, home-loving, bourgeois and academic other side.
So 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. There is a shameful lack of empathy in me - a self-sufficiency that disregards the opinions of others. 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. Moreover 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. Paul O’Kelly 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. But 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. With great courage I revealed all of my insecurities as a man as well as my fear of women, feminism and the world of courtship. My paintings visually documented the Yeatsian man caught between the desire for action and the desire for contemplative withdrawal. My text paintings and especially my Dear Woman assemblages of 1995 dramatize 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. Robert Hughes wrote: "truly bad art is always
sincere" ('Art: Careerism and Hype Amidst The Image Haze',
Time, 1985) - and my 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. But since so 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 – women’s 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. Many of my paintings have been deliberately 'spoilt' by over writing
with text or 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
and I never use an eraser in my drawings – 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.
I am often at my best and most crowd-pleasing in my small bravura drawings
or paintings - in which I said the least. 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
no tracing, no squaring up and no projecting of the image. Because I am fearful of criticism, chronically shy and hate most interactions with real people, about 80% of my work is based on photographs, of which about 60% are found photographs from newspapers, fashion, pornographic, boxing or wargaming magazines. However my interpretations of these photographs is neither literal nor unaltered. I do not copy photographs - I interpret them! The pose of the model and the composition of the figure setting 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). 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. Sickert, 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 popular culture 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. Moreover I do not use photographs out of an inability to create images of my own. I also paint numerous paintings based upon my own photographs. I create many images from stilled video pieces both from television and my own home videos. I make collages, which create different kinds of visual connections. I paint abstracts based on nothing but my own sketches. Moreover I create Surreal images from my imagination and I make many studies from life in all kinds of mediums.
A Case Study In Madness
"[Art is] The perpetual immoral subversion
of the existing order." Marquis De
Sade Some times 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 therapist 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 - 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. 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, 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 – the complacent and lifeless 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 the shape of styles 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 opperators who attent every openings - 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, 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 99.99% of the art world. True artist’s – 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 – who’s only true belief is power and money – not the idealism of creative expression. I one the other hand – make art out of an inner necessity - not
out of a desire for recognition or wealth. 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 - many of them are not. Nor is it to say I believe that every criticism of me to be well phrased and well made - I do not. But it is to say that the truth of my art - does not lie with me alone (that way I know from experience leads only 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 is. 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 facts of my rejections and the reactions my work have
provoked as recorded not only by myself, but by fellow artists, critics
and dealers close to me who have witnessed it first hand. I may not be
a great artist, but my work quite definitely upsets and angers many art
world insiders - though again strangely it has not offended the So I loath the professionalism, of the contemporary artist - their reduction of art to just another branch of; photo-journalism, conceptual reportage, academic navel gazing, teenage illustration, adolescent media goofiness, abstract decoration, or city fun fairs. The vast army of artists world wide 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. So debased is art today, that it is seen as unsophisticated, adolescent and provincial to at least try to make art that transforms the way existence is understood. 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) 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 lowly 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. 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 mawkish 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 utterly unsellable!
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 understatement. The average man on the street - 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 - and all of ones efforts are frequently greeted with hostility, denial and bitterness. However they can also be some of the most meaningful friendships. 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. Like the Hero in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ decadent and Symbolist novel A’rebours (Against Nature) in silence I watched; television, 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. However I still believe that art can hint at the depths of human experiences – but one has to have had a life fill in the blanks. I have always been a loner, neurotic and melancholic, art as a form of
therapy has in many ways saved me from total 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 close touch with the sources of my 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. 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 is many forms of art that I can admire and enjoy - the art I truly admire 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. Leo Tolosty 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 To me the antithesis of great truthful art is Kitsch. Kitsch is not in my opinion a matter of medium (as it was for Greenberg who classified Tin Pan Ally music, popular magazines and Cinema amongst other things as Kitsch). In my view there has for example been amazingly authentic musicians (Parker, Dylan, Cohen, Morrissey and Cobain,) and film-makers (Alfred Hitchcock, Igmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch) who have made a high art of their usually debased mediums. But whatever the medium the problem remains – 99.9999% 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.
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, I do not consider myself now at the age of thirty-six to be mad. Though my nine attempted suicides, three psychiatric incarnations, sexual perversions and drug abuse in my youth, would certainly have deemed me a lunatic in the eyes of many in the past. Since the age of twenty-one, I have taken anti-depressants like Prozac and Seroxate and anti-psychotics like Melleril and these drugs have largely curbed my depression. 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; de Sade, Goya, Holderlin, Blake,
Friedrich, Kleist, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Stringberg,
Esnor, 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. 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? 99.999% of the art they make, curate, buy, auction, and write about is 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 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.
Techniques and Working Methods T 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 relentless fortissimo of expressive victimized and self-pitying complaint.
I was no teenage prodigy, my early clotted and tumultuous canvases testify to this. Many of my painting's - 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. It is a very sculptural approach to painting. 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. I share the layman 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. About a third of my output from 1992-96, were brightly coloured intuitive freely expressed abstracts, with clear gestural brushwork, distinct colours and think impastos, crude collages, awkward figure and portrait drawings and sketches for sculptures. Between 1995-2002 I produced numerous druggy collages, abstracts and drawings. Hashish destroyed my critical faculties and led me to produce works of limited drawing ability, crude colouring and wonky compositional structure. About seventy percent of my out-put between 1996-2002 were hastily drawn sketches, doodles, vignettes, roughly made collages, crude abstractions and awkward figure drawings and paintings. Between 1995-2005 I drew over twelve hundred crude black permanent marker drawings in 51 Daler-Rowney sketchbooks. My notebook drawings are limited in aesthetic depth or appeal. They are all executed in one medium (black permanent marker) and lack variety of touch and line. They are comical efforts when compared to most high-school art student’s sketchbooks never mind the great books of Delacroix, Degas or Picasso. Despite producing over four thousand art works between 1987-2007, in terms of quality my oeuvre is probably the most inconsistent in art history. Only around two 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 1,500) 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. However an artist deserves to be judged on his best work and there are at least forty paintings and drawings of mine - which reached world class standards. So the core of my art can roughly be derived into four major periods; 1987-90 - My 'Black Paintings' and classical drawings which were made up of a very sever linear drawing style with bold outlines, sharp contrasts of tone, and paintings of predominately dark colours. 1991-95 - 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 Venn diagrams. 1996-2001 - Abstract and text images, jammed with text, Venn diagrams and abstract smears of pure colour straight from the tube, often on ready made supports such as pornographic magazine pages, photographs, war maps and other artists paintings. 2002-2007 - Expressive realist paintings of pornographic orgies, boxers, self-portraits and highly stylised naturalistic nudes and nature studies. Painting in my lifetime has swung from expressive cynical pastiches of Modernism, to limp theatrical works of ever diminishing aesthetic weight and pleasure. In an art world whose historical memory goes no further back than Warhol, I have studied in depth, huge swathes of the history of Western art and drawn inspiration and strength from it. At a time when, video, photography, digital images, installations and 'ready-mades' hold sway, I stick to traditional mediums. I never produced fashionable media-savvy art works like Warhol, Koons, or Hirst. Moreover I only rarely achieved the traditional technical mastery of artists like, Picasso, Beckman, Freud or Richter.
The Panic Self-Portrait “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.” “A man cannot look in the mirror at his own image
with the eyes of a stranger; his moral egoism constantly whispers in his
ear a precaution. It is not another ego but my own ego that I see.” “True nakedness is a confrontation with the charnel
house of the body: the knowledge of the physical mortality and frailty.”
For fans of my work – my self-portraits have always been my greatest
contribution to Irish art. My self-portraits (particularly those of 1991)
are the high point of my creative oveure. There is nothing understaded
or modest about my self-examination. There is nothing sensual, spiritual
or erotic about my nakedness in these paintings. They are compelling works
of brutal frankness. 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 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. 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 the paintings of myself attempting self-harm - briefly purged the desire to harm myself. 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, 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.
Towards A Pornographic High Art "To my mind art exists in the realm of contemplation,
and is bound by some sort of imaginative transposition. The moment art
becomes an incentive to action it loses its true character. This is my
objection to painting with a communist program and it would also apply
to pornography." 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 utterly 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 at large. 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 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. I do not attack art, but its abuse at the hands of cynical self-satisfied operators, academics, and media whores who make art with money hungry dead hands.
As I have hinted at already - for me the professional lives and intellectual
observations of most artists are utterly worthless. I could not care less
for the kitsch efforts of commercial landscape painters, the fashionable
pastiches of art students, the dull worthy work of academics or the modish
gibberish of 'cutting-edge' art world stars. I have no interest in painting
to please the tastes of others, to decorate the homes of the ignorant
middle classes, or pander to the politically correct concerns of the media
elite. 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 sever, so hurtful and so uncontainable by art that I was never
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 painting are; two adult men
with one adult woman, two adult women with one adult man, orgies, fellatio,
cunnilingus, sodomy, and Urology (watersports). 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. 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 de Sade and Bataille.
One of my first reviewers Ruth Herrington (TNT: Trinty News Two, December
6th 2000) keenly recognised 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….” Frequently my art dealt with the problematic relationship of the modern
male to the emancipated female and the challenges to male identity in
an increasingly feminized world. Specifically, it expressed what men actually
felt about sexual desire and women as opposed to what they claimed to
feel. In so doing, my work was often brutally frank about the baseness
of the male agenda, and the pleasure seeking motives of both genders.
In my female pornographic nudes, the subject was attacked, not observed.
The women were sexually desired, not loved or spiritually comprehended.
My pornographic paintings had little in common with contemporary artists
using sexual imagery like; David Salle, Jeff Koons, The Champman Brothers,
Andres Serano, 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. 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 turn’s herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Well written, but is Berger’s 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. So 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. 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. 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 mother/monster, saint/sinner, Madonna/whore, 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. In politics, business, religion, sport and public life it is men who hold centre stage - wives, girlfriends and family membe |
and dismissive of popular culture and the lives of the common man. 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 eat very little and
usually have only one meal a day. I am no great fan of Pub culture and
do not drink very much. I buy clothes very rarely (once a year at most),
I do not dine out much and have no interest in the latest technological
gadgets or trappings of middle class life. I spend most of my money on
cigarettes, art materials, art books, pornographic videos and hashish.
I watch very little television, when I do, I watch; the news, art documentaries,
history documentaries (especially World War Two), world boxing championships,
Ultimate Fighting Championships (a form of mixed martial arts), and reality
shows. I only buy English newspapers (The London Standard, The Guardian,
The Times, The Independent, and The Telegraph) and only for their art
reviews. 
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 don’t
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, argumentative, and know-it-all
man when talking about art - I have ruined most of my few opportunities
in the art world - through my overweening self-regard, arrogance, bitching
and querulous nature. So 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 either no real talent, love, knowledge or
passion for art. 
work was often embarrassingly crippled by adolescent sincerity. The life
from which my art was emitted like a scream, 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 undermined much of my art - and
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. 
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. 
It
means that when I draw - I never use a eraser. If I make a mistake in
my drawings, I either over draw the corrections or throw away the drawing
altogether. In my painting it means trying to 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. But the rawness of my
work which results form these working methods - is what makes my works
so emotionally effective and revealing.
taking
copious amounts of drugs in my late twenties, or being angrily rejected
by 89 arts bodies - my life was as far from the discrete life of an academic
painter as one could imagine. You don’t 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 myself.
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. But their contempt
for my art and life - is equally matched by my contempt for them and most
of those who populate the art world. 
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 sexuality 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. 
general
public as much. Paradoxically, it has been men in the art world who have
reacted with the greatest hostility and even aggression towards my art.
Whereas (with a few exceptions) many of the most fervent and interested
fans of my work have been women. 
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 politic pressure groups
(though their knowledge of politics is adolescent 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 right on 'artistic types' art is a mode of collective teenage
identity and teenage identity is as proscribed as any of the aforementioned.
In an extremely puritanical and hypocritical world, which still refuses
to deal openly with images of sex, my art is polemical and at once socially
rejected and secretly desired by a puerile media. My work depicts pornographic
images decisively, without censorship, ambiguity or artfulness. The technical
power of my pornographic work, its sheer prehensile skill, laborious technique
and over fifteen year production, is a rebuke to all those who would doubt
the seriousness of my artistic intentions. 
despair.
In fact as I have mentioned many have said that my works only value is
as an example for the psychiatrist - not for the art historian. So be
it. I actually have a great interest in psychology and biography. 
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
The
Madness of An Art of Honesty
Indeed one of the most cogent analysis 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 deemed that his death was a necessary sacrifice
for the greater good of the society at large. 
here
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 49 Charakterkopfe (character heads)
Gericault`s portraits of ‘Monomanica’s’ and his paintings
of body parts and severed heads, Damier`s street scenes, Richard Gerstl's
suicidal self-portaits, Egon Schiele`s nudes and self-portraits, Kokoschka`s
psychological portraits, Dubuffet’s 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. 
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. However, 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.
brushstrokes
of van Gogh, the fragmented flesh tones of Freud, the synthetic background
colours of Warhol, the 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 - in their own
right 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, I have been often harshly criticized by dealers - 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. In an art world in which drawing is either the pursuit of
narrow minded academics or almost entirely derived from comic strips,
graphic design and unschooled doodling - my emotive drawings carry a real
brutal charge.
and Sigmund Freud's observation that the subject of a painting has the
strongest immediate impact on 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,
or desire or fear, or depict 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,
only after I have established the correct drawing do I move on to painting.
I very rarely begin any painting without a considered preliminary under
drawing. 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-scientific approach to painting
underpins the emotional explosiveness of all my work. In my best work
the marriage of sound 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.
Anyone
who has ever looked at a large body of self-portraits, must quickly recognise
that one self-portrait is pretty much the same as another. There are only
so many ways a self-regarding man can depict himself – usually staring
directly out at the viewer – pallet and brushes in hand. Most self-portraits
suffer from being contrived and stilted. Often one feels that the artist
has even less understanding of themselves than we their audience. The
history of self-portraits in Western art is a comparatively short one
– starting with the late Gothic period. They are really only a sub
genre of a genre – portraiture. But when created by master psychologists
and technically superb painters (like Durer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Schiele,
or Freud) it is to my mind – the greatest of all genres. It is the
closest painting ever gets to pure autobiography. Self-portrature is often
an excuse for self-love in all its forms – even atuo-erotisim. Artists
create self-portraits for many different reasons. They may make them in
order to declare their membership of an esteemed profession (not a anyomous
craft), to advertise their skills to patrons, as a record of self-love,
in place of an unavailable model, as an expreiment in a new style or technique
- or merely to pass the time. The results may be a superb form of self-anylisis
– self-critical, unmerciliess and wise - or mere posturing bluster.
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 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.
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; "
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 wasn't till
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, I only came a couple of dozen times. My sex
with men was an utter aberration – I never had an orgasm with a
man. 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 don’t 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 touchy subject for me. Maybe the touchiest subject. 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. It's not that I
prefer pornography to sex. Its 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
it’s 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. Its 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.