My Recent Acrylics Paintings

Updated: Sep 22

I had been displaying more of my assorted entartete art paintings. They're degenerate. After all, they are abstract, and all abstraction is a deviation. Beauty is better than zany originality. I've been attempting realism for about a year, edging closer to sanity and unlearning bad habits. My spirit sapped by the conditions of Kali Yuga, I think, really, that we could refer to these abstract paintings as pseudo-art. I would like, in time and laboriously - to my natural limit - to mitigate the damage of the worst impulses as much as can be done. Representing the real-world as closely as possible by correct detailed observation and attention confers greater benefit if one is truly to align with any genuine philosophy of Beauty, and with the fundamental generative principle of Nature that fulfils the cycles of the physical universe. There is no need to fantasize, elaborate, or lie for the sake of ego or hubris.

When I attempt to privately sell the decadent pieces I have painted, of which there are far more than displayed, I usually charge £10 for a painted canvas, or £20 if I am pushing it (or indeed £35 when selling on Etsy due to their deductions and site fees). I do not sell my realist works as I am not convinced that they are good enough so far for what they are to put a price tag onto. Anyone can paint a few squiggles as a second-class pot-boiler, and European tastes are not really refined as they once were. Perhaps exploiting the boorishness of indiscriminate consumerist Neanderthals whilst limiting my artistic skills by sheer force of habit is cynical of me. These cultureless Neanderthal minds remain the vast majority of the West though. I like to hand my developing realist pieces to family members on request, as presents, and will paint privately for friends.

There's a mild movement spread to the canvasses, rather than just one genre of Modern Art. An abstract mixture of Surrealism, Expressionism, Cubism and Vorticism, with that familiar Art Brut spin. As some people say to me, occasionally, no, I am not exactly Picasso. Oddly though, if you examine some of his Cubist-period paintings, they're not fundamentally too different. Mine are just softer, cuddlier, and more colourful. I suspect he had major investors backing him and was working at an opportune time for that sort of art, as well as utilizing the sort of social references that would get him a lot of business, Guernica, or what have you. Rothko, though highlighted as subtle in places, is known for what ultimately amount to large fields of flat colour, sometimes rather similar. Duchamp is known for stealing a public urinal and extorting millions from gallery-goers for this spectacle of avant-garde nouveau culture (genuine pre-existing culture evidently not being good enough for him). The conceptual performance artist Marina Abramovic lets patrons kick her and beat her for hours as an interactive performance. Just for formulaic variation from that, and a weary example, Tracy Emin displays the recreated feminist horrors of her messy bed and seems to have made a few pounds or so.

I think I'm okay... certainly not good. I rarely get time in my life to paint and am often exhausted. My work is - accurately - merely "okay..." and it requires real artists to absorb it and provide pointers (once they have it in their hands). At least okay compared with some of the lucrative sludge inundating the art world, contributions that, on the whole, I consider to be pretentious time-wasting. I like Picasso's blue period slightly more, his more-realistic character studies in non-abstract Expressionism, much as I cannot enjoy him as an artist. That more reasonable does not mean he did not also spend some years paintings stripes, whirls, leering disjointed faces, and colourful geometric boxes though. My prior art remains fairly abstract. It's not to postmodern splatter-painting level though, and takes more than 5 minutes to complete, as I do slightly more to my canvasses than rotate them on an axis whilst standing above pouring down an industrial can of green paint. Those pieces sell too, sometimes for many millions, the entire commercial modern art world of upmarket galleries and showcases being more of a vast money laundering operation and a sordid business primarily conducted for reasons of sweeping ideological propaganda and the subversion of public gallery-goers. To enter art with anything but a clear head and a dedicated loyalty to Beauty is to waste one's time.

I am trying, slowly, to draw back from abstract work. I think, if a gallery venture goes well (I've had some luck with an extended Northern Irish exhibition recently), I might finish the remaining half-done pieces I have in this style, of which I have about 17 outstanding currently, perhaps try and part with those also, and then move on to another genre, exclusively realist. Or just leave them unfinished, a testament to a more immature period in my artistic experimentation.

I enjoyed painting "Armchair View" (there is only one) for my father and consider a non-movement interior, figure, and landscape style might be more challenging and interesting for me to develop into. I like the idea of not selling them, saving them for a better world, handing the crapper ones out like sweeties for a few quid, and then extorting the art world itself with something worth purchase, if only there were any decent humans left by then to appreciate what it is to want to own paintings one enjoys examining at length. I don't have Beauty, but I'm working on it.

My favourite artists are Rembrandt, Sargent, Sisley, Franz von Stuck (oddly), Ensor (in places), and Rossetti, although I enjoy Goya, Tissot, and Albert Cresswell, and there are quite a few more. From childhood, I have drawn pleasure from the detailed, exuberant (often quite amusing) realism of Mike Wilks, the patiently observant, brightly coloured plant and animal sketches of Ernst Haeckel, classic fantasy art and ink illustration by British artists such as Rodney Matthews and Ian Miller, and the classical Flemish resonances of Jacek Yerka’s intricate, brooding oil paintings. To some degree it inspired my adult art preferences, although these days my tastes are more towards Pre-Raphaelite Romanticism, the Hague School, the French Barbizon School, Biedermeier, Peredvizhniki, a general Historicism and Classical Realism, and indeed a couple of Renaissance painters, slightly fonder of the High Renaissance works than Mannerism, and then the late 20th Century amateur natural landscapes and still lifes in oil that I collect and display across the walls of our bedroom, stairwell, and painting room.

I'm sure you weren't quite expecting this sort of candid introduction. I know my general painting level though, and have high standards, and am not generally a people pleaser, and there's no point masking my lazy immaturity merely for a pat on the back and a fresh, whipped-up pile of Rhinegold to stack beneath my quite nicely made bed. Good in desperation, but in general, it embarrasses me.

My Ugly Paintings