These black and white shapes and patternised designs are meant to contrast with the range of colours I’ve used in other areas of my work.  They are also meant, in the exclusion of colour, the exact opposite (reverse psychology).

 

This format is painted on canvas, ink drawing, candles, figures, papier-mâché heads of animals, boxes and small pieces of furniture. Sometimes these form a sequence of tracing the spiritual lifeline of cultured symbiosis with their ancestors, gods, etc.  Sometimes, they form spiral and patterned shapes.

 

Recently I’ve taken to refer the present economic affliction towards the developed western advanced economies.  I have drawn dark and disturbing spew of black ink emanating from envelopes that have been ripped apart and the original and official contents (a letter from the bank, etc) being almost demonically distributed and distorted. 

 

Flowers pressed and suffocated in a recycled frame from the sub-economy of charity shops, but super-imposed upon each other in an unsettling, almost animalistic series if images.  It is not surprising that, growing up in an era of black and white TV that 1960s and 1970s Op Art engages, for me, the almost surreal hallucination of social and economic misfortune of economies around the world today.

 

This unreal world is made more so by the relative absence of global mob rule. Unlike eighteenth century France, instead Islamic fundamentalism has emerged in its place, especially in the middle-east. Black signifies their new terror, but just as the Hindu reclamation of the swastika from Nazi misappropriates, so I am mindful of using black as a redemptive subtle reference as opposed to Islamic militancy under the darkness of a black flag.