A collection of Trompe L'Oeil paintings exploring the narrative of cultural rejection
PARADISE LOST 1. Acrylic on Board
PARADISE LOST 2. Acrylic on Board
PARADISE LOST 3. Acrylic on Board
PARADISE LOST 4. Acrylic on Board
Notes on "Paradise Lost"
The trompe l’oeil Paradise Lost series describes the echoes of an action, a satirical narrative about rejection showing the classic marks so familiar to artists who are unsuccessful in open competitions.
The Paradise Lost series pays homage to the thousands of shattered hopes one never sees, the invisible social iceberg below the media theatres of success. The painting is a quiet monument to the many failures we never see. As such, it makes us wonder about the nature of being judged.
Just as art has taken possession of our diminished religiosity, so its market structure retains old theocratic systems within new fetishized monopolies that often advance subjective edicts of adoration via expensively made objects. We may easily imagine some of art's gatekeepers as a symbolic Holy See, their chalk marks of approbation or damnation mimicking the language of a new corporate Reformation, itself harking back to the "thumbing" Colosseum masters of Rome complete with similar symbols of anonomous judgement.
Today’s cultural rejections thus symbolise religious excommunication, hence my Miltonian title of eviction from the Garden of Eden; Paradise Lost.
In visual terms, Paradise Lost doesn’t materially express emotion as one might see in a contemporary abstract. There is no direct physical theatre and yet there is evidence of the torn, the wiped chalk and consequential finger marks of the invisible sufferer holding their work at arms length. This aesthetic self-effacement anchors itself to the religious tableaux’s of the past, a pre- El Greco picture plane where the story may be dramatic yet the ego consciously removed by invisible brushing. In a culture prizing egotism, a realist narrative like Paradise Lost can expect no mercy from a culture steeped in the cult of self-reflective materialism. One could almost consider the work a cultural relic of martyrdom, like Caravaggio’s St Matthew or it being framed by kitsch fetishized encasements like (for example) the Holy Foreskin or the Cranium of Saint Sebastian.
Stretching these metaphors to breaking point, Paradise Lost is further complicated by the indeterminate place we may be viewing it. Hung as the “painting” we are in the room, never seeing the “back” of the rejected painting. by our imagination we may escape into being the timeless spectre on the other side, imagining the true artwork as a mediocre piece in a silent bedsit or a recently “discovered” masterpiece in a high class museum. This forces us to meditate on the undiscovered and transitory nature of cultural approval.
In further play, I made one as a rotating “sculpture”. With the two sides revealed, the whole work is exposed to be judged by the good or bad aesthetic markers of the age.
As an icon of savage waste, Paradise Lost proposes the anthropic observation that so much of nature’s beauty is lost to the murderous hyper-competition for survival. Perhaps then, Paradise Lost is not so much a quasi-Religious depiction of the art world but a Darwinian one.
The Paradise Lost series pays homage to the thousands of shattered hopes one never sees, the invisible social iceberg below the media theatres of success. The painting is a quiet monument to the many failures we never see. As such, it makes us wonder about the nature of being judged.
Just as art has taken possession of our diminished religiosity, so its market structure retains old theocratic systems within new fetishized monopolies that often advance subjective edicts of adoration via expensively made objects. We may easily imagine some of art's gatekeepers as a symbolic Holy See, their chalk marks of approbation or damnation mimicking the language of a new corporate Reformation, itself harking back to the "thumbing" Colosseum masters of Rome complete with similar symbols of anonomous judgement.
Today’s cultural rejections thus symbolise religious excommunication, hence my Miltonian title of eviction from the Garden of Eden; Paradise Lost.
In visual terms, Paradise Lost doesn’t materially express emotion as one might see in a contemporary abstract. There is no direct physical theatre and yet there is evidence of the torn, the wiped chalk and consequential finger marks of the invisible sufferer holding their work at arms length. This aesthetic self-effacement anchors itself to the religious tableaux’s of the past, a pre- El Greco picture plane where the story may be dramatic yet the ego consciously removed by invisible brushing. In a culture prizing egotism, a realist narrative like Paradise Lost can expect no mercy from a culture steeped in the cult of self-reflective materialism. One could almost consider the work a cultural relic of martyrdom, like Caravaggio’s St Matthew or it being framed by kitsch fetishized encasements like (for example) the Holy Foreskin or the Cranium of Saint Sebastian.
Stretching these metaphors to breaking point, Paradise Lost is further complicated by the indeterminate place we may be viewing it. Hung as the “painting” we are in the room, never seeing the “back” of the rejected painting. by our imagination we may escape into being the timeless spectre on the other side, imagining the true artwork as a mediocre piece in a silent bedsit or a recently “discovered” masterpiece in a high class museum. This forces us to meditate on the undiscovered and transitory nature of cultural approval.
In further play, I made one as a rotating “sculpture”. With the two sides revealed, the whole work is exposed to be judged by the good or bad aesthetic markers of the age.
As an icon of savage waste, Paradise Lost proposes the anthropic observation that so much of nature’s beauty is lost to the murderous hyper-competition for survival. Perhaps then, Paradise Lost is not so much a quasi-Religious depiction of the art world but a Darwinian one.