The winter of 2023 will go down in my personal history as the shittest
winter ever. Bedridden through sickness for my birthday (Oct 7th),
Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, the whole period was riddled with
illness preventing me from working, exercising or socialising. It was
bloody miserable. One particular bout of illness started off with an
incredibly intense two days of sleeping and constant pain. No eating, I
was just about capable of hobbling frailly to the bathroom. Other than
that, I couldn’t physically stay awake for more than five minutes and
the moments I was awake I was squinting through a thick fog of madness
and pain. Any source of light caused my migraine to flare up and send
pulses of agony through my head and eyes. For the first day and a half
I had a recurring dream which went round on a loop every minute or so.
Dream: I was in my bed and there was a cuboid running vertically from
top to bottom and another smaller one perpendicular to it. The shapes
created a sense of claustrophobic discomfort and were imbued with
significance. Their tension in space meant that I had to work out how
to move them to make them fit harmoniously. As I was doing it, within
the dream I would have the realisation that I had had this dream
already. The dream would end and after a short break would start over.
Each time it started it felt like a new one but by the end it was clear
that it was the same dream (perhaps with some minor variation). I was
stuck in this loop for a day and a half and even after waking up to go
to the bathroom, on going back to sleep the dream restarted. Something
terrible and serious was going on. Not only was my mind on the fritz, I
was so physically weak that when the bedclothes got caught on a corner
of the bed, I was unable to pull them away to cover myself back up so I
just lay there cold and helpless. There were moments when I was lying
face down in the pillow with all my life force sucked out of me when it
occurred to me that I might be dying. I was on 2% battery. Sam Smith, the
darling of the British art scene, dies of exhaustion. Finally, after three days, the recurring dreams had stopped but I couldn’t think properly. My brain was unable to explore and develop sequences of ideas. My thoughts had
become very short and simple. Brain. No. Working. What was weird is
that I knew that it hadn’t always been this way but I couldn’t quite
recall what it had been like. It was extremely concerning to feel as
though my cognitive capacity (something of great value to me), had
potentially been lost or destroyed. When I eventually did regain my
sanity, my physical health was still lacking. I just had no energy to
do anything and felt an intense downward pull on my whole body the
entire time. This went on for over a month after the initial
psychedelic death trip.
From October to January I must have lost about 6-8 weeks of work to
illness. A substantial chunk of my life and time I had intended on
using to paint had been taken from me. I felt anxious, frustrated and
angry. When I was eventually able to work again, all that pent-up
frustration came roaring out of me... Hence ‘Bleurg!’. The image remains
quite a mystery to me as it contains weeks of emotion condensed into
one image, so any attempt to understand it here is incomplete.
Nevertheless... The beast expresses something of the horror and
destructive spirit I was experiencing and intuitively represents
something negative. Paradoxically I think there are positive elements
to it: Its dynamism brings life to the scene and something comical
about its tongue and open mouth. To me, it is the beast which is
shouting ‘Bleurg!’. The three figures (horse, beast & man) are
intertwined in a tangle which might also read as though the bull is
bursting through the horse. The horse in previous works, in approximate
terms, tends to represent the nature of working (a painting has an
independent nature but also can acquiesce to allowing the artist to
ride it). The man, in contrast to the horse, is the version of me that
faces outwards into the world. Where the animals might represent the
‘id’ (the primary instincts and impulses), the man probably represents
the civilised part of me (the superego). So... the beast is bursting
through the horse (chaos disrupting my intentions to work) and the man
is responding to it. It is not clear whether he has been shocked and
thrown from his horse by the interruption of the beast or whether he is
twisting to swing a weapon (concealed by his body) to attack the bull.
Interpreted as a positive, the image may well depict the destruction of
my own artistic tendencies and limitations, albeit with the
apprehension and surprise of the part of me that wants to hold onto
order and the familiar. This interpretation sits well when considered
alongside ‘Wonderful Graffiti’; the two works united by carefree
slashes and arcing cuts across the page which portray a purpose and an
aggression and a new direction in terms of a foray away from figuration
into the abstract. With the benefit of writing this a month after
executing the painting, it seems that this work heralds an evolution in
my work as I march brazenly into new artistic territory. Aside from the
painting’s narrative on my personal creative evolution, there may also
be the pragmatic realisation that darkness and light are co-dependent
and the dynamic between the two being life and meaning-giving. Perhaps
being swaddled up in my bedclothes was an unpleasant but constructive
cocooning stage preceding the explosion into a new phase of life and
work... ’Bleurg!’