Dismantling cultural sentimentality can be a tricky process, his use of comic characters such as images of cowboys, cowgirls, guns and horses immediately deflate any sense of political turbulence, although it is still always there, hovering in the background, clinically assessing the power of this particular set of signifiers.

The media as well as the twisted tales of opportunistic histories, many of which were little more than ad hoc myth invented for the sole purpose of engendering figures of power and commerce to the public's hearts. As Hollywood matured the traditional central hero character of Westerns was frequently utilised as a device to parallel the woes and failings of modern society. As cowboy movies moved on through the decades the clear cut line between the bad guys and the good guys began to blur, the devastation of the Native American culture was re-examined, the rise of the anti-hero in many of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, and finally the drudgery and desolation of frontier life were brought to the fore.

However, Hollywood has a habit of reinventing itself as well as many of its movie genres time and time again, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so. As with sex, nostalgia sells, and it sells far more than the brutal and usually rather uninspiring tales of history laid bare. The historical iconographies and biographies of those who have been deemed brave and courageous, political or military genius, the noble aspirations of peoples in turmoil, can be tarnished. A modern myth cannot be sustained, the plethora of communications technology, the failings of the PR industry to sustain their exaggerations under the naked light of the truth, the eternal reduction in the attention span of the human race, it just doesn't happen.

The past offers a chance to rewrite the imperfections of any culture, given enough time and momentum a fake heritage can be nurtured through the resultant misrepresentations of the creative industry. America compared to many European countries is still relatively young, what would be considered colloquial in Britain is seen as antique in the USA. I live in a town where the majority of houses are over a century old, it is a heritage area and thus protected from any major development. But houses of this age are commonplace in Britain, I have rented apartments in houses built as far back as the 16th Century, but again this is not a rarity. History surrounds the British as does a majority of Europeans, so much so we take it for granted.

America must find and venerate history wherever it can find it, to the extent the monetary value of relatively recent and rather mundane items that could be found in any humble home a century before can, in certain cases, reach tens of thousands of dollars. The frontier era is treasured for many reasons by the Americans, it captures the essence of a spirit of freedom, a conquering of the unknown, a battle against the hardship of subsistence farming, clan wars regarding the claim of territories, the rush for gold and oil, and literally the establishment of a nation. The cowboy stands a lone figure, winning against impossible odds, a stake in a new life with broader horizons than anyone across the continent could have  imagined at the time.

Hollywood and in turn government, corporate America and the citizens of the United States view this era with a heartfelt nostalgia that cannot truly be understood by other cultures of the world. Life was hard, men were men, women were women, the many fought bravely for the good of all, the survival of a nation depended on the glamorisation of the humble cow herder. Life has moved on, but the metaphorical resonance of the cowboy in everything from marketing to politics means that this icon of a frontier country will remain powerful for many years to come. Albeit the fact that Straub, amongst others, is consciously deconstructing this myth, in my opinion, merely feeds the beast of nostalgia so deep in the heart of contemporary American culture.

To see more of Matt Straub's fascinating work try these following sites:-

Opus Art

One Art World

Art Price

Art Net

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Anyway here's a few shots of an early attempt at Black Christ, it's the black ink layer screen, I didn't even get to try out a print yet as you can see the image runs too close to the edge and has deteriorated under the jet washer. A real shame as I was so looking forward to getting started!

The light areas are actually caused by camera flash.

As you can see I'll need a wider coating trough, I'm clipping the sides of the image as it is. What's more the emulsion I was using was far too thick, I've bought another tub, this time a brand I remember using at East Dalston's Print Club. Here's a close up of the main offending area, where the worst deterioration took place. I basically over washed it, mainly because it never really exposed.

However, in the areas where there was enough emulsion the detail is perfect!

Still I've learned a few lessons, I need 1 min 25 seconds rather than the advised 55 seconds stated in the emulsion literature. I also need thinner emulsion (which I now have) so it doesn't settle so thick, will dry quickly and won't need as much washing out.

Still for me it's exciting stuff, not as exciting as actually getting on with the printing (lol) but I'm keeping my fingers crossed Black Christ will be available for sale for Christmas, which is ironically rather apt.

Anyway, in the meantime I've been working on a couple of ideas for Spunky.co.uk, a rather cool Brit t-shirt brand I've designed for before. I'm in two minds about these illustrations though, both based on old WW2 propaganda posters, they maybe a little too political for the label. We will see.

Democracy

A reinterpretation of an old Soviet era propaganda piece, a self explanatory comment on the state of modern life and the conflicts between the ideals of corporate capitalism and true democracy.

Nuke Model

I've experimented with a more painterly style for this design. Essentially it's a play on the words 'Nude Model', and comments on the distraction techniques most governments employ at times of crisis. I realise I've been working more and more graphically in order to be able to create screen prints. However in the long term I'd like to start painting a few canvases again.

Next week I'll start on the Black Christ screens again, hopefully (at least) one colour layer of the 48 limited edition prints will be complete by the next weekend.  Once it's ready I'll be removing the option for digital prints, which will apply to all my works from now on. I'll keep you posted no matter what happens next lol.

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Asides the usual associations with bands like the Beetles, and rock guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, actors including Goldie Horn and Cary Grant, and singer and performer Barbara Streisand have taken a 'trip' from time to time. You'd probably be surprised at just how many creative people in the late 20th Century have partaken in LSD, unless you're into your drugs, then you probably have more examples to offer. I'm not trying to legitimise the drug, I'm simply giving the uninitiated a little background on what is probably the strangest member of a vast family of narcotics, bar DMT which although I have only read about its effects, as far as I can tell is as weird as it gets.

Originally LSD was sold as liquid in small bottles, there was an extreme danger of consuming too much and soon small squares of blotter paper soaked in the chemical were used instead. As the acid culture grew so did the range of LSD available, microdots, window panes, white lightning, Californian sunrise amongst the slightly variant trips available. Some such as window panes were in fact small pieces of gelatin rather than paper, however many of the more traditional 'brands' continue use blotting paper to this day.

Blotter Barn offers a unique inside peek at a rare and relatively recent subculture, one which has for the main part stood alone since the early 70s. A generation of deep thinkers and acid casualties, some with clinical mental illnesses walk the world, some producing great art, literature, and music, others banging their heads against a padded wall. Acid offers the richest rewards of self enlightenment, but this rite of passage is tainted by the fear of chemical imbalance, toxic mixes, and the inevitable 'bad trip'

The acid generation all have 'acid stories' as do I, some funny, some strange, some terrifying, which are quietly and sometimes secretly shared with others of like mind, though this tradition of hallucinogenic oral history is being lost to a new generation of smart drug producers and users. The future is all about the high, the past is filled with navel gazers, the art of the trip has been lost, with little more to show than the ephemera of the psychedelic age.

Blotter art is a highly persuasive form of outsider art, literally outside of society, on the fringe of both consciousness and sanity. These near microscopic images represent levels and areas of intoxication, self questioning, perception changing event, and brutal deconstruction that the experience is shared with but a very few of the greatest poets, painters and philosophers of times past.

Take a trip to BlotterBarn.com

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I discovered him recently whilst reviewing on of his t-shirts and was glad to see his hardcore sensibilities for pushing the envelope off the cliff and stamping it into the sand whilst the ocean turns it to little more than spume, is heartening for a guy like me. I love to break the back of everything from a political conspiracy, to a social hypocrisy, a media-fuelled gust of public relationship building, to the wholly owned and conglomerated views of the multi-national corporations, it's good to see I'm not alone. In fact it is a massive relief. Much of the urban and street art is for me decorative, the few names with the ability to comment on the state of play, and conceive it in a perfection of illustrated vision are few and far between. Though those who can perform this magic balancing act are definitely appreciated by a vast swathe of urban art fans. The same applies to Kenyon Bajus, yet it may be some time before this man can live purely from his art, the recession is biting, his independent streak is as strong as ever, and like myself he's going to have to wait for the majority of the public to play 'catch up. But damn it's coming, it's just around the corner. The insightful, those with vision who can create will have their day, the world is run by grey minds in grey suits who spend their lives staring at lists of numbers flickering on a screen. But that is going to change. I can feel it in the air (tonight - lol).

As a boy Bajus had a habit of drawing loathed and loved figures in history with their genitals hanging out, sometimes in the act of sexually satisfying themselves, and usually in other pupils' text books. The reaction as they opened their books for lessons, and most likely everyone else's provided him with a great deal of entertainment. His work has of course matured, the subject matter more social comment than crude humour, though the underlying nature of much of his humour is still rather childish. However I love that, the juxtaposition between political commentary, the media, figures of love and hate, and the ongoing petty jibes reflect our lives to the tee these days.

We live as sheep, mollycoddled by government, corporations and the plutocracy, assured the world will be fine, the ecology and the economy will recover, but as the Victorians insisted, we the people like their children should be seen and not heard. Worse still I am sure that asides our dwindling trickle of money, the powers that be would rather we were neither seen nor heard.

Then again there are still plenty of rather more juvenile ideas floating around in Bajus' portfolio, but I for one think there's plenty more room for humour in the arts scene. So many deadly serious ideas in art are normally championed by dealers, galleries and auction houses desperate to hike the prices on the 'next big thing. Bajus works on the street and in the studio, he's adamant that C-3PO is gay and is of the belief that Bambi was a dude. Check out all his work and his mental state at www.kenyonb.com.

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That's where the similarity between Doyle's art and the mass made low-cost paraphernalia of the past ends. It's a deceptive ruse, an open invitation to the uninquiring mind and conservative opinionate, to think again about the world we live in. Perfection is a myth, in an expanding scale of relativity, both macroscopic and microscopic, one will eventually find fault with any idealised vision of life, society, mankind. The same process unfolds on every viewing of Thomas Doyle's dioramas of pain.

In a strange way Doyle's work reminds me of the often debunked yet still intriguing 'Stone Tape Theory'. The premise being, should a violent or extreme act, be it physically or emotionally should have occurred in the past, a re-enactment of the event will forever be replayed within that precise location. The ghosts of violence past, captured forever, sealed in the very bricks of a building or structure much like a recording, ever to be replayed for posterity should an audience encroach.

Technically Doyle's dioramas are perfectly scaled down and modelled renditions of everyday suburban life. However unlike mass-made souvenir 'snow globes', the viewer is rewarded with something other than the usual idealised vision of life one might expect from, but rather a voyeuristic and prurient view of lives shattered by violence, deceit, malevolence, and guilt. His minute characters can be seen burying their murdered victims, suffering emotional turmoil, sharing pain and fear, experiencing isolation, cannibalism, dimensional shift, in fact almost everything a real human being can feel or imagine is explored in Doyle's inimitable style.

As of now he has completed three series entitled 'Distillations',  'Reclamations', and 'Bearings'. Following a childhood obsessions with modelling miniatures, and an early artistic career creating and printing mono and lithographic prints, Doyle began to feel that his ideas and subject matter were best suited to the microscopic world of the diorama. Personally, Doyle prefers to stay on the sidelines of art discussion, his work is not easily categorised, and his subject matter belies his particular medium. Yet, as with all model makers, Doyle spends a vast majority of his time painstakingly working on detailed figurines, houses, trees, lawns and so on. His influences are varied, be it urban myths, news media, the surburban world in which he inhabits. The distillation of these influential factors is a subconscious process, something much like a screenplay writer envisioning a pitch for a movie, the events and characters forming the overall look of the piece in question.

In an interview with UndergroundMagazines.com Doyle explains the story behind his work Escalation, part of the Distillations series - "My father worked at an auto factory with a large cast of characters, one of whom was a drug-addled hothead who gathered all of his estranged wife’s possessions from their home, piled them in the backyard, chopped them with an ax, and set them aflame. The bizarre brutality of this act always seemed so cinematic to me, and years later it sparked what you see…'

In another of his works The Reprisal, a male and female couple are seen preparing to bury the corpses of another couple, however all is not as it seems at first glance. Notice the shoes on the female body match those of the female perpetrator, as do the jeans match the male's, to me this transforms the piece from a potential scene in CSI, to something far more metaphorical, indeed even mystical. The idea of renewal, revenge on past selves, and drawing a line under a past that will forever be forgotten.

Asides concurrent themes of the home, both as sanctuary and hub of traumatic memories, Doyle also toys with the themes of time and context. Utilising the power of his chosen medium to its fullest, his 'frozen moments' as displayed in such works as Something in the Absence from the Bearings series and Clearing (UXO), offer more than a glimpse into his intentions as an artist, and the emotional relationship Doyle has formed with his process of creation. Akin to a slither of time or reality, made concrete and permanent and affixed for all eternity under the protective shell of a glass bell jar. A slice of life trapped within the a single still from a movie, ensconsced in its own shroud of tantalising mystery, forever forsaking the before and after, the continuity of events that so often breeds and instills an insentivity or even irreverance towards pain and suffering in everyday life. But beyond that are themes of the omnipresent myth, the order of things, the giganticism of exterior context that relatively speaking reduces the greatest and most aspirational teachings and knowledge of man to mere dust.

In Thomas Doyle's world, we are gods, giants looming over in prurient curiosity, objectively reviewing the miniscule machinations of a microscopic race, their limitations both physically and intellectually, suffocated by their lack of scale, held down by the great weight of objective distance, and molecularised subjectivity.

View more of Thomas Doyle's work at www.ThomasDoyle.net.

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His highly naturalistic style is reminiscent of scientific and educational textbooks, encyclopaedias and natural history dioramas. However more striking still is the juxtaposition of powerful scenes of ecological destruction and raw beauty of nature, intrinsically opening up a moral debate regarding the progress of civilisation at the cost of the very support system that has enabled it to survive and expand throughout the aeons of time.

Most of the damage and destruction inflicted on the world has been conducted by a very thin slice of Man's progeny, indeed less than a few generations have through a variety of chemical, industrial, and biological processes wiped a massive percentage of biodiversity from history, forever. Capitalism is based upon the idea of growth, the premise that sustainability equals commercial stagnation. For example at one time in Britain, a particular car company Austin, developed the Morris Minor, it was simply constructed, almost every section could be replaced, commonly by the owner, or a local mechanic. The raw materials for production included metal and wood, but no plastic. Many of Morris Minors are still being driven to this day, especially in the Sub Continent and Eastern Europe. So what's the problem? The problem is that Austin soon found that unlike today, whereby millions of cars are replaced almost every year or two, a Morris Minor can potentially last a hundred years with little more than light maintenance. Soon the company went bust, it was making massive losses as past customers would need little more than spare parts, no one needed a new car.

The lessons learned from sustainable manufacturing has resulted in an influx of vast and greedy corporations obsessed with every heightening the need for mass consumption. To create this market almost all products in the world are made to an inferior standard, thereby ensuring repeat custom. This in turn has created a new problem, waste, vast landfill sites, deep sea dumps, toxic ground water pollution, plastic mountains, and untapped methane pockets are encroaching on more and more of the last pristine areas of wildlife in the world. Chemicals, bi-products of years of industrial processing, many of which are now banned, have entered the evolutionary chain, light enough to rise with the heat of the sun and fall with the rain, many coal-powered energy plants still pollute the skies with substances such as Barium. This chemical cocktail is causing infertility and mutation in many insects, fish, mammals, even humans around the world.

Nestle amongst other companies bottle clean spring water in Third World countries, they neither clean nor treat it for any potential disease, they simply package it and sell it back to the poor. The same with foreign water companies, who invest in pipelines and treatment centres, racking up the price of water so only the rich can afford it. The rest must drink from filthy rivers and ponds, many of which are heavily polluted due to the lack of governmental intervention. This ironically is exactly the reason rich Western companies will even consider investing in such areas, they can literally get away with murder.

Honey bees are dying out, it may seem a trivial thing in the grand scheme of things, but without honey bees there will be no further pollination, plant life will die out, this will both kill off much of the world's wildlife but also contribute to pollution. Much of our ecology, what remains of it, is in fact a carbon sink, without it we breathe less oxygen, we will in turn all die.

The false objectivization of our natural world is displayed prominently in much of Keye's work, he depicts our abstraction, our disconnection with the ecology, this distance will one day destroy us as it has so many other animals on this planet. Animals portray a root connection with nature, their instincts alert and pure as were ours in ancient pre-history. We can use language, interpretative discourse to ally our primal fears, they cannot. The rabbit which features in many of Keye's paintings acts almost as a warning signal, a siren, an alarm call. Hyenas are scavengers, feeding as do buzzards and crows, on the remains of another's kill, carrion. The consumption and mutation of N. American wildlife is also heavily featured, sections of flesh removed from deer, two-headed rabbits, and so on.

Other paintings such as "The Entangle" and "Street" series, represent, at least for me personally, something of a more hopeful message, or at least for wildlife at large. Nature encroaching upon our concrete environment, roots tearing apart roads, statues wrapped in vines and weeds. Essentially, should man cease to exist, nature will recover, life of some description will continue to survive. The worst element to the human race, akin to a virus or infestation in nature, is our number. The more of us there are, the more pollution, the less space and natural resources, the more damage to the ecosystem.

Check out more of Josh Keyes' work at www.joshkeyes.net. There's also a great interview with Keyes here and find out about his upcoming shows here.

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Geddes crosses the line of reality and fictions with the ease that a child might leap from one side of a narrow stream to the other, except in this case rather than water, it is our collective consciousness that runs torrents through the visual landscape, for it is our media-fuelled and fictionalized imagination that he dutifully records and remonstrates in immaculate detail.

Many of the works may technically lend themselves to all manner of traditional painting styles, such as the early Dutch Masters and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but in subject matter and composition I’d cite film as his Geddes’ main influence. The silver screen has done much to vicariously and simultaneously bring mankind together and pull them apart. These days we can culturally identify with fiction as deeply and closely as we do fact. Although in truth we have travelled no further than the Moon, in our collective psyche are implanted false memories of distant galaxies, alien races and battles on such a vast scale they would have easily expended the human race ten or even a hundred times over. Biologically we have regressed and progressed towards new races and old, genetic fears instilled by such scientific aberrations as the zombie genre, the dead rising and attacking the living is now a familiar fictional adage. Yet these influences, these machinations of imagination take root in our daily lives through the world they symbolically mirror.

Our world is over populated, yet there are more lonely and isolated individuals than ever before, this distance is a necessary evil in what would otherwise be an intolerably invasive world. We sacrifice the few for the entertainment of all, delving into the very being of celebrities, those who play the characters we feel our planet so deservedly needs and in antithesis those so monstrous we can relish in the bizarre practice of despising with literal glee and relish.

What I feel is represented in Geddes’ work is that space, the distance be it existential, psychological or physical we as human beings experience en masse and alone, we are lost, our prior dreams of world peace, the conquest of space, the perfection of the body, the extension of the mind, all falter in comparison to our hopes and wishes for an impossible future. We are still alone in the universe, we seek via programs such as SETI for some proof of intelligent life other than our own, for we need context, comparison, a relative scale beyond the incestuous discussions within our own clique that can be measured in a far greater pool of data, where for now only our dreams exist.

We still communicate with cumbersome sounds and marks, we cannot truly hear each others thoughts. Our individual understanding of the world around us is nothing more than a glimpse of the profundity of scale we still cannot dare to surmise. We are each lost in a malaise of compromise in recognition, truth and purpose. The scaled down visions of the impossible do little to allay the fear that none of us truly understand the whole story of Man, be it scientific, social, theosophical, or philosophical. Intellectually, from outside our realm of understanding, we are still barely more advanced than the apes from which we have evolved. There is no other species on earth that can intellectually consider it’s own death, and thus we have constructed social apparati to hold back this tide of fear and doubt, distractions beyond the realm of consequence, art and science to douse our fiery instincts, to calm the perplexing minutiae of existence itself.

We are a speck of dust in the universe, what we view as fundamental, as logical, is but another belief system embedded within a thousand others. We float through lives with little consequence, but for the recognition of those in the same circumstance, for we are mortal, yet our imagination is potentially infinite. Man must cling to his dreams, for almost always the firmament of knowledge, the grounds for understanding who and what we are will always give way to an even deeper plateau of contextual instinct and fear.

Much of modern society is held within the ethereal and temporal, it will decay and reduce to a byline of ancient history, as many preceding cultures have done so before us. Each year more languages are lost, more land is left uninhabitable, the seas rise as does the population count, government has intrinsically reduced to soft fascism, holding the line hard and fast in order to buoy up the spectacle of the global market. Yet one by one we gather what we can to hold dear our own unique representation of the life we lead together, documenting and recording every moment of our existence as if it is our last. We hold back the years and fears of what is to come, death for one, death for all. The precipice that we as a race now encroach upturns all notions of logic, this empire is crumbling but it is too painful to contemplate. Through whatever means possible we are all guilty of escaping our subsumed and cognitive reality, it is simply not enough anymore, if it was, we would have a shared identity that would in essence deplete the need for art, expression, scientific endeavour and the ideology of what may or may not happen in our man-made linear space/time continuum.

Geddes holds a moment, all rules fail to be realised, gravity has died, as has the temporal flux we obsess with a minutiae of detail and comparison. The floating astronaut provides no answers, his predicament is beyond our understanding, yet innately we see him transmute from superman to baby, the world is a womb and all of us are but seeds of what is to come. We are in essence the genetic fodder that may one day feed what will both understand and pity our precarious existence. If one were to learn the true nature of the universe, it would most likely rob them of all impetus for life as a human being. We are shaped by our limitations, and limited by the impossibility of understanding the infinite. Chance, chaos,the sequentiality of haphazard events, all contribute to the tome we cite as our true history. Yet within that tale, that myth of accomplishment are many clues, previously deemed insignificant details that show we always knew we were and are lost.

The instinct of survival, homoeostasis, is the reason why we are alive long enough to intellectually, emotionally and spiritually question our existence. A distinct polarity, at odds with the empiricism of religion and science, a fluid and random didactic that powers the engines of progress through the intolerance for the nonsensical. Those wise enough to understand the more they learn the less they know accept that there are no answers, answers are but the convolutions of previous lines of questioning, we exercise our right to exist in a seamless space of fantastical logic and logical fantasy. We float in space with little more than the comfort of ourselves, of our own kind, our agreement that we exist.

View more of Jeremy Geddes’ works at www.jeremygeddesart.com, where you can view his paintings and purchase limited edition prints. Jeremy was born in New Zealand, he has been published in several books and magazines, picking up a Spectrum Gold Award for his comic cover Doomed. He has illustrated one graphic novel in a collaboration with Gary Crew entitled ‘The Mystery of Eilean Mor‘.

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ThisMan.org are on a quest to find the answer, proposing a whole ream of theories to explain the phenomena, which you can read up on here. Those theories include some of my own pet faves, such as the Archetype Theory, something that those familiar with Carl Jung’s works will be well aware of, the Religious Theory, and a very intriguing Dream Surfer Theory.

Here is a quick run down on the beginning of this modern myth according to ThisMan.org -"In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. On more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life. That portrait lay forgotten on the psychiatrist’s desk for a few days until another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life. The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN."

See other dream interpretations of this subconscious face for the masses here. Posters are beginning to appear all over the world asking for more witnesses, others who may have been contacted by This Man. It should be a fascinating insight into the complete lack of understanding of sleep, dreaming, and the potential of the mind to surpass a logical framework superimposed in order to maintain our race at an equilibrium of function over desire - but for one problem…

The fact is the domain ThisMan.org is registered by Italian guerilla marketing company www.guerrigliamarketing.it which more than likely means that this is probably one of the most subversive and subtle campaigns ever initiated. There’s still no clue as to why, for instance what product they may eventually promote using this ploy, it could be a vast market research program analysing gullibility, but I’d like to think that these cheeky Italians are just doing it for the kicks.

Always take life in the 21st Century with a pinch of salt, lying is the ultimate form of marketing, and it’s seeping into every walk of life, then again exaggeration and untruths are as old as mankind. At least art does it for a purer purpose, to allow us to question ourselves and the nature of reality. This Man will probably be selling you potato chips in the next few years.

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There are elements of Futurism in his work which for me, being drawn upon influences of a technological society rather than the aspirations and glorifications of a vision of a ‘machine age’ are both more successful in conception and completion, Being of a time where nature and artifice battle for dominance in a mostly sterile and corporate world, a clash between the wet dreams of corporate retail environments and street art, Vernon’s imagery reflects our lives, albeit in an abstract fashion, immersed and enmeshed in a stream of continual architectural and social reinvention.

His work responds to an expectation of the artificial, an augmented reality of digitised celebrities and CGI enhanced Hollywood movies, an entanglement of the very engineering of today’s society from all quarters of industry and leisure. For what is our generation’s landscape if it is not the conflicting mass of one corporate agenda against another. Convenience has cost us dear, the irony that we may view the remains of the natural habitat around us via a car on a motorway, or the brief respite of open land between the tunnelling ride of an intercontinental train, the view from a skyscraper window, or the letterbox perspective of a flat screen television.

The spine of much of Vernon’s paintings offer a transitory parallel with the thin and ethereal threads of humanity in its most natural form, the physicality of the senses, non-verbal communication, the simplest pleasures of eating, sleeping, connecting with others on the most innate and instinctual of consciousnesses. This spine of natural and spontaneous being is cloaked within a framework of clustered repetition, artifice and plasticised architecture forming both bridges and tunnels of social expectation, transversely consuming space in the name of necessity and utility, which ultimately induces submission by the individual and mass at large. Ancient mankind may at first glance witness the wonders of our cities, the beauty of glass towers glinting in a strange and multi-coloured smog, but soon they too would learn that innately we have built ourselves a prison, a cage of unfathomable vision and expense that will one day prove to serve as our downfall.

The cacophony of progress has depleted much of what is most fundamental to the continuation of life on this planet, the moment the power runs out, or the groundwater is too polluted to consume, the day that the world economy finally collapses under the false tenet that growth is sustainable, or that politicians can no longer inspire the trust of the people, our greatest triumphs will become our greatest nightmare. The cities will be ablaze with destruction and violence, almost nowhere will be capable of supporting life within the metropoli of the USA, China, Europe and beyond. The people will flee towards the last remnants of nature in a vain attempt to subsist. At that moment the artificiality of our present culture will flail from the surface of architectural might, as with say the Ancient Britons, stone temples, roads and aqueducts were dismantled almost immediately after the collapse of the Roman Empire, so will the same happen to our own grand hive.

Yet in that chaos there is beauty, as if witnessing vast biological processes or chemical reactions on a global scale, Vernon’s work allows the viewer to emotively hypothesise on all manner of hybrid symbolism, iconographic relativism, and visual apparatus from every field of endeavour be it maps, engineering blueprints, architectural drawings or microscopic data of unknown context, resulting in a free-for-all of colour, form, iconography and composition. Alluding to the precepts of perspectival laws, Vernons’s paintings emulate physical depth, distance and space without purpose, without the next for the cumbersome traditions of form versus function. Both are one and the same viewed from different subjective states.

Oliver Vernon is a veritable Hadron Collider of the visual arts, smashing together the very atoms of what we believe to be the perceptual reality around us, emotively charged and seductively infused with all the colours of a neon sky, pierced by the aspirations of man pulled to the very core by our fears of imbalance and our civilisation’s proverbial fear of heights yet unattained. We are the precipice, Oliver Vernon provides visual cues, maps to remonstrate our path towards, in and beyond the natural disaster of the devolution of progress.

View more of Oliver Vernon’s paintings at www.oliververnon.com.

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If there was such thing as a foetal time machine, I’d rather have been seeded by Puckey’s parents, though I somehow doubt I would have ever matched his talent for sculpture. Still the opportunities for creative advancement were everywhere then, money was not at the top of the list of priorities, it was possible to be creative and eat. It took quite a long time for Britain to turn full circle, tire of corporate iconography and manufactured pop and begin once again to tout the talent of a dispossessed generation. At college our tutors constantly informed us that we were ‘Thatcher’s Children’, the most fearful, depressed, repressed and conservative year to pass through the doors in decades. We’d had the stuffing knocked out of us long before we’d arrived, it was the British way, speak when you’re spoken to, earn your keep, keep your head down, behave.

It’s nice to see that Thom Puckey is still kicking ass, his work is both beautiful and abrasive, skilfully crafted yet highly obtuse, he’s spent so long sticking two fingers up at the establishment it’s become the norm now. His nudes adorned with military hardware are recognised around the world, but he’s created a wealth of other iconic pieces spanning many ideas which you might not be so familiar with, and so here are a few of my favourites…

The Nothing Nothings

The pose is adapted from Stanley Spencer’s painting ‘Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife’ (1937). The title is taken from a translation into English of Martin Heidegger’s "das Nichts selbst nichtet", "The Nothing Nothings". As with Spencer’s work their are slight religious references, including the figurative poses and the makeshift altar, however this is intertwined with both themes of erotica and in essence mortality. Unnervingly each of the women in the sculpture hold guns, one sticking out her tongue as she points hers towards the other. I could be reading too much into it but I’d guess that on another level the guns are representative of phalli, in fact Stanley Spencer’s painting depicts his ageing lesbian wife, his second wife, which also includes hunks of meat in the foreground. The absolute negative of infinity, something that most religions attempt to interpret symbollically, is nothing. Nothingness is indeed a negation, any meaning absorbed in nothingness, must itself be absent. Death is a negation of life, infinity is a negation of the finite, omnipresence is a negation of presence.

A.V. with Knife and RPG-7

Toying with the notions of classical sculpture, the mutability of marble is astounding in this piece, representing a female figure, perched upon a cushioned pedestal, armed with a knife and RPG-7. The female figure has throughout history been used to symbolise all manner of subjects be it fertility, grace, beauty, nature, however this piece seems to reflect more of the state of modern society, the fearful public mindset engendered by mass media manipulation and corrupt government. More particularly the divisiveness between the sexes, the stranglehold of the male authoritarian agenda in many parts of the world, and the complex and almost inevitable collapse of personal relationships. The female body is designed to harbour life, in this sculpture it threatens to destroy it in the same breath.

Fallen (1999)

Fallen was commissioned by Baken Park Lyceum in 1999 and is located at the Secondary school ‘Het Baken’ Almere, Holland, and first off, in case you’re confused, it’s actually nothing to do with UFO sightings in Holland, it’s more a comment about public art. More precisely referencing the with much of his work he refers to the identity and meaning of art, the origins of public art, its purpose and effect on the surrounding environment, or more simplistically ‘art falling from the sky’. Recalling the eighties, when local government frequently asked for works that functioned as a beacon for an entire district. In other words something monumental, nothing could be more monumental than the scale of our collective culture in the great scheme of things. We as a civilisation are fragile, our art commemorates miniscule changes in a microscopic Zeitgeist which relatively speaking, in the vast expanse of the universe, is so minute it is indicipherable.

Mitrailleuse

A "Mitrailleuse" is a French word referring to all machine guns, however in English it only applies to volley guns with multiple barrels of rifle calibre. However I believe their maybe some wordplay going on here, such as with the French word ‘chantreuse’ meaning female singer. A female gunner, perhaps even stunner? Who knows, a poweful piece all the same.

Cloud Airplane

Commissioned by the city of Zwolle, for the new city area of Stadshagen, part of a series of 4 monumental sculptures of mine, a site specific sculpture, this glorious marble statue towers above at five metres high and 4.5 metres wide. A beautiful piece taking a familiar sight way out of context, the experience of seeing planes fly above, leaving vapour trails, instant clouds across the skies has always left me emotionally torn. Both beautiful and damaging, much like most of the subject matter that Puckey engages.

See the rest of his work at www.thompuckey.com.

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