Cold War Relics and curios

Cold War Relics and curios lie at the bottom of the pile of rubble that used to keep new thinkers in check, both sides of the The Berlin Art Wall. It seems only a combo of Democracy and Capitalism can still sustain multiple pendulumic swings and economic and ideological cycles without recourse for dictatorship!

Back Story:

How did we evolve after the end of the Cold War? Well, as a Painter it involves the status of 'Form' being reset. Everyone knows my resistance to the elite determining the many Painters to being left and abandoned by the Art scene since 1985, and I think I may not have all the answers to that question. However, ‘Form’ almost deconstructed itself and collapsed (if not entirely) as becoming old and almost obsolete in a new epoch of globalisation liberated by the partial defeat of global Soviet Marxism Leninism by the calculus of Capitalism. This was a rejuvenated era of post relativist Western and post Marxist dialogue; this affected and created their own dialectic in mutual recovery avoiding the turmoil the major superpowers had feared. Bold and brassy post European division became the political asset that eased fears of global conflict. It is often forgotten that Europe (let alone the USA who had brokered the deal to transform the ex-Warsaw Pact countries) was once again in a healing process on its united continent, bound by revolutionary forms of global investment to shock-treat hitherto Marxist paradigms into the global as well as the European family. The new Russian Federation knew it would have to catch-up with its new found wealth and its massive reorganisation process and de-Communist transformation, but it also knew that it would have to weave a new form of Parliamentary Democracy to make Russia form Capitalism Russian style- it would renew its ancient entrepreneurial DNA to upskill a la Russia and plan for its re-entry as a world power with both Soviet experience and its destruction as well as being the newest and most hungry Capitalist to enhance its prominence, both in full view and yet under the radar of an ambivalent international world, weary of suspicion and exhausted from winning the Cold war. People forget winning a war may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory that you didn't see coming!

Form and faux reasoning was a frozen binary view of visual Art that self-perpetuated the restrictive practices that limited Painting to Abstract or representative, landscape or portrait became lifeless in the still life of the canvas, but these were boundaries that were only temporary and thus ripe for transcending, energizing the medium of Painting that has self-evolved since into the mass practitioner movement in the UK today where most are self-taught! ! ! Instead of suffocating obstinate and over controlling nature of the art Top Table who exercised too much power to write-off any medium anyway, Painters have embraced paradox and anomalies that are our contemporary boundaries that we can work with, defy, rethink and reset, that rejects relativism and its didacticism, and departs from over-micro-management and centralised determinism of suspending, draining and recasting Painting to be personified as an old aged pensioner who should be taken into Art Care before he/she does any Art self-harm!

So, enthuse about a wave of individualism that isn't socially constructed but becomes a visual existential choice to self-define. We should welcome clashes of mindsets, collision of hemispheres of the imaginative mind and accept individualism versus collectivistic monopoly run by the few, as well as looking beyond internalising to explore Universes and galaxies that both stimulate our minds as well as revitalising our visual vocabulary without any external filter.

Why not the multiplicity of collages that intersect and expel, where opposites interact and fuse or dissolve or evoke or evolve as well as de-evolve. Let’s see what crashes, clashes or collides and open-up new imagery and brave subject matter.

Our planet provides massive heat and climate differences, but we're temperate compared with worlds of ice or extreme boiling terror to humanity yet appear beautiful and immense, and we can engage via our telescopes in space as well as our unique human eye that is our natural 'telescope' to view the giant gas clouds or supernovas So we don't just visualise the microscopic but the macroscopic too where the infinitesimal is valued and the drama that unfolds in worlds we barely know of, that encircle white and black holes that light -up our canvases and illuminate how dark matter and dark energy may reside - like physics visual Painting is and remains a speculative guesstimation of all that impacts on our terrestrial home. Light may not escape black holes, but we are war artists visualising galaxies doing battle with giant plumes of heat, gas, and new and undiscovered biochemical potential ramming each other over millions or billions of years. Look out for millions or billions of colourful spectrums displaying incalculable images, way beyond our human knowledge, lighting-up our palettes devouring our canvases. that resemble x-rays but also are cosmic x-rays of the future, past and present. How does something that is in our everyday medical practice in society so prophetic an explanation of the grandeur of the Universe? It begs the question 'Does any other 'under our nose' technology illuminate any other aspect of Cosmic life? Science always searches for both the truth as well as illuminating the no-truth, so why can't the medium of Painting do the same? Perhaps more exploration of the ocean's depths that are hitherto undiscovered will once again show us alien-like creatures that are a further manifestation of how little we humans actually know?

Time, light and our solar system does not stay still, and our Painting images are paradoxically provide a still moment to emphasise movement and eternal celestial motion of both contraction and expansion that mirrors our relationship with Art Painting that resembles an advance on the 19th and 20th centuries of modernism, episodic and constantly circling our and every age! Likewise, I paint to merge and separate, fragment and unify in a way that I can't predict and therefore can't control or determine or over micro manage, and so I ask the viewer to perceive things I will have missed or underestimated, refusing to capture and proprietalise, let alone make it an easy image to comprehend -complete and obvious is another form of dot to dot drawing for the under 7's, and manipulates the viewer just because the Painter can't relinquish control of the image? ?

It's not simply either minimalist or maximalist, binary choice, or relativistic ambivalence, but an exercise on the canvas of combo's that vary in emphasis. I overpaint and underpaint, I access new possibilities to see and to leave elements even unfinished but resolved at the expense of the predictable. I overlap and I fuse to escape the obvious, and I leave and secrete mark-making that only I know of. or that I can conceal. But sometimes people leave before there is their big day before the official opening to reveal a piece of architecture that maybe unique, leaving us the public and the Painter as one, obligated to imagine after the opening and revelation without any instructions.

But for all Painters there will be a time when his/her work maybe too predictable, or acquiescent and we'll all have to redress the limitations that will require a rebirth or a reset and to migrate to find renewal. I find comfort in the Gen Z who seem divided by the forces of reaction and rebellion, but furthermore, I feel that progress and regress are part of the same pendulumic swing that I feel as a visual Painter is my responsibility to explore and welcome the cycle of hope that is regenerative. I also pray that we all should make peace by breaking bread with those we don't admire or have anything in common with. But that's just someone who is influenced by the film 'Interstellar', who believes that 'love' and 'faith' may be undiscovered ways of travel or understanding of more of the Universe.