Archives for category: text
This is a small recent piece which employs the pastel palette I have favoured lately. The bomber suggests threat. Holes could be for rivets or made by bullets. The fragility and transience of all existence is implicit.
Anything built can be destroyed.
Translates as “life in the grey city”
This work is from 2010. A friend recently observed that work from this time has a more chaotic, turbulent feel than many of my more recent pieces where the elements are contained and tamed within structures and ruled lines.
As is habitual, this work contains various pieces of detritus from my life at the time. The cover of a demo tape from one of my former bands, Serpentine Smile, is obliterated in the top left corner. The dripped on ruins of the ‘bongo cafe’ from a friend’s fanzine nestles along the lower edge.
Here is another map like piece, providing a kind of ordnance survey of my subconscious at the time through personally resonant materials, marks and lines. The stains in the lower section were created with a syringe filled with tea.
Please click to zoom in and explore.
I suppose this is a sister piece to Reconnaissance (https://johnmacormacart.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/reconnaissance/).
It was made shortly afterwards and exhibits a similar structure with the large city like shape in the top left connected to its satellites via delicate vein like lines. I have often worked like this, loosely copying pieces that I consider to be moderately interesting and formally balanced. The ‘copied’ piece rarely resembles the original in detail.
The snaking quote, referring to “the problem of making people love their servitude” is from Aldous Huxley.
This piece dates from 2009. The bull heads and headless body and the rabbit are quite surreal and humorous elements of the composition, which could be interpreted as symbolic of (impotent) strength and weakness. It is deliberately left open to interpretation. Everyday materials like the piece of the brown paper bag, grease proof paper and the torn piece of foolscap were employed alongside the fragments of text.
size: A3
John Macormac 