On the Singularity in the Multitude.

12/7/2020

This Blogpost is in response to an invitation from the artist Gerry Smith to chronicle memories about being inspired to make Art.

One of my earliest memories looking at art is of being at my Aunt's house in the South Wales Valleys coal mining town of Treorchy, looking at an illustrated medical reference book containing anatomical drawings.

Most Artists anatomy reference books focus on the generally hard structural tissues of the musculoskeletal system. My memory of the book I was fascinated by, was probably aimed at medical students and practitioners, it focused on the soft tissue of circulatory processes within and between organs. I would scrutinise these intricate drawings as if attempting to work out a complex puzzle.

What

The book was in a room that was more like a studio, it had a small library and also my uncle's piano. He was the Church Organist.

I remember looking at the mine pit-heads resembling the Martians from the War of the Worlds. The pit-head winches lowered the cages of miners and digging tools down the vertical shafts descending to the branching and snaking subterranean mines tracking along the seams of condensed, rotted organic material that is coal.

The mining towns nestling in the South Wales Valleys snake into each other connected and shaped by the convoluted terrain they inhabit, forming close human communities woven together by church, rugby and choir.

The Valleys

This condensed urban environment was in stark contrast to the area that I grew up in. The Thames Valley flood plain underlies a vast, flat, homogeneous, commuter spill spreading out beyond Heathrow from the South West London suburbs.

The Plain

The town of Farnborough forms a hub within the vast suburban sprawl stretching out across the land. It is where the first powered flight was made in England by Samuel Cody in 1908 leading to formation of The Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE).
Both the house I grew up in and the secondary school I attended were situated on the approach flight path of Farnborough aerodrome. I wanted to escape from school and toward the latter year or two truanted with increasing frequency eventually Playing Truant in the Art Room.

The RAE was a significant local employer and many friends and family including myself worked there. I also flew gliders there at weekends. It was a military research facility and the skies over Farnborough were populated by exotic and often predatory flying machines.

Brain Bomber

All of the above experiences have influenced me; I was always drawing in an attempt to explore the physical and biological systems as well as diverse cultures, machinery, structure and process.

I went to Middlesex Poly (formerly Hornsey School of Art) and focused mainly on Painting though also did printmaking and some sculpture, film and video.
One of the most memorable pieces of advice I received was from Brian, the print technician, who informed me that simple complexity was preferable to complex simplicity, that has stuck with me, I don't know if I achieve it.

In the Zeros I began to visit Mexico, Belize and Guatamala with some frequency. I was privileged to do some diving exploring the baroque fissures of the vast network of sinkholes and underwater caves twisting through the fractured limestone beneath the jungle of that region as well as exploring the long abandoned ruins of Mayan cities. I was inspired to draw furiously, infected by the dense Mayan and Aztec imagery carved into the limestone pyramids and monolithic structures.