Panic Grief

Panic Grief, was in a way the end of Panic Art. When I found my mother dead of a heart attack in her bungalow in the early hours of Tuesday 13th January 2009, was the moment an enfant terrible became a sad old man. It was when my exhibitionistic desire for punishment and disgrace was brought up short by the end of time for my mother. As her son in mourning, I felt demands I had ever experienced, ones that came from within me. Suddenly I cared about my reputation, if only to preserve the dignity of hers. It was a time when my sociopathic self-confidence was shattered, and everything to do with living became impossible for me. Never in my life had more people told me I was a great artist, but I felt like an utter sham. Suddenly I saw my young art as the sick, depraved, shameful and adolescent crap it had been described by older artists all my life.

My childhood ended the day my mother died. I had spent my life lost in a boyish playing with paints to escape from the real world of adults. A nightmare child filled with narcissistic rage against a world that denied me the artistic glory I demanded - I painted pictures of hate and anger and was shocked when nothing I made was admired, exhibited, bought or sold.

With the death of my mother, the wooden sets of my theatre of self came crumbling down – exposing me to a world of annihilation and exposure. Like a vanquished Don Quixote, I wandered around my house all my dreams shattered. I was paralyzed by regret, lamentation and shame and unable to express my anguish anywhere but in my art. My inspiration alternated between hope and despair. My panic filled art had always been based on a frantic belief that I could through sheer effort change the course of my life – out of the hell of my domestic psychodrama and into the world of historical significances. Now my illusions, delusions, grandiose fantasies and self-justifications were exposed as abject lies without a shred of meaning in the real world. Except perhaps as another not very original example of depraved male egotism and lust for glory.

My mother’s death revealed my true worth in the world – zero. I wondered if I could change? I wondered if I could start again? But where could a man with no qualifications, no history of employment, no friendships, no contacts and a mental illness go? So, I was left like a prisoner on death row, to continue my lonely pursuit of an absurd and pointless art. My experience of death, my frantic frenzy of painting to defy it, the effects of hashish and my attempts at rebirth reinforced my narcissism monstrously.

As I battled to regain my sanity after my mother’s death, I witnessed a world which had become increasingly insane and unpredictable. Having lived my life as an anarchist, I looked with disbelief and increasing fear as Western society itself became increasingly fragmented and anarchistic. I had been waiting for the world to end for over thirty years and I thought the time was surely coming. There would be a second market collapse, a war, the oil would run out and then the water.

The panic I experienced in grief – was of an order I had never known before. It was total and absolute. The loneliness and fear I experienced after my mother’s death, was of a kind I could never have imagined while she had been there to protect me from myself and the world she knew perfectly well I could not deal with.

It was not just my mother who had died. It was my hopes and dreams as well. During the weeks when I was not painting, I was thinking fretful about my life of sin, the anti-social and inhuman nature of much of my early work. In my mind, I tried to find some way to balance the ethical, aesthetic and cogitative aspects of art with the profane, carnal and sinful. I could find no solution. I was plunged into a purgatory of self-inquisition. I picked over the scabs of my life, morosely confronting what an awful human being I had been. Night after night in the courthouse of my mind, I imagined all who had known me - assume the witness box to condemn me to death by self-torture.

My writhing self-portraits and pornographic nudes from late 1991-1992 were from a zone of adolescent narcissistic rage, I no longer knew. For three years from 2006-2009, I had battled with my sexual obsessions in my art – producing less and less hardcore works and becoming engrossed in other genres like landscapes, still life, self-portraits, and portraits. However, after my mother’s death, my battle became more intense. I wondered if a sinner like me could produce scared work or at least work of beauty, wisdom, and humanity. Yet, this was what I strove to achieve. 

That I continued to live, that I continued to paint was due to one soul alone – my girlfriend of five years, who took up the burden of my soul in a way I would never have expected her or anyone to do. Nevertheless, I painted in abject pain and what I created was gauchely tragic in so many ways. I desperately used art as therapy for grief.

My fanatical twenty-two-year self would have despised the thirty-eight-year-old sell-out that I had become. Yet my older self could not even comprehend the cruel and heartless decadent that I had been in my twenties. As a youth, I wanted to scream, but as a middle-aged man, I could only bare silence.

I had started the marathon of art with my head full of ambition. I thought there could be no doubt that I would be one of the winners. Suddenly I saw the field of runners ahead of me break away as the likes of Picasso faded in the distance. I ran harder and harder, sure I could catch him up. Yet not only did he run further away – but youths my own age also began leaving me far behind. Now I had been running twenty-eight years and I was not even allowed to run on the same road as the others and I kept running down side roads, perhaps because my pride would not allow me to head home with my tail between my legs. So I kept running howling at the moon.

No matter how desperately I tried, I could not escape myself, or my home that increasingly felt like a tomb.  I could find no answers to my question, or solution to my damnation. I had no other choice but to continue painting pictures nobody wanted. I was addicted to art and doomed to pursue it despite the rejection, derision and animosity it aroused in those that knew me. I was terrified of what would become of my work after my death and would constantly talk to Carol about it. “I mean, who will love my children!” I joked to her, quoting a deliciously bad film title. 

I never felt like more of a child. Never more fragile. Thirty-eight and I could not see the world in adult terms any more. I wanted my mother. I wanted to see her smile again. I wanted to remember when painting had been so simple for me. I painted and drew dozens of images of myself as a child.

I painted images of mother’s death, and of her life. Yet once completed and photographed, I felt sick mixing them into picture files containing my erotic and anger filled narcissistic works. In my mind, I could not balance or separate, life and death, shameless sex and tearful regret.

I painted Catholic paintings – even though my faith was one of hopeless, helpless despair not devout conviction. I thought I was asking for troubling making religious art that conservatives would decry as blasphemous, and Liberals would see as laughable or irrelevant. Moreover, with every cross I added to my works, I was petrified that my work might be seen as sacrilegious. They weren’t. If only they were. That would have been easy. I wanted there to be something up there. Somewhere beyond this life, my mother was safe and guarding me.