“You are forced to pretend outward respect for people and institutions which you find ridiculous… You remain cowardly attached to moral or social conventions you despise, condemn and which you know lack all foundation... It’s the permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires on the one hand and all the dead forms and vain phantoms of your civilization on the other that makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality because every moment the free play of your strength is restrained, impeded and checked. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
Octave Mirbeau, My Mission, Chapter 8, Torture Garden, 1899. Suffolk: Dedalus. 2019, P. 94-95.
“by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself… Henceforth, and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable… in relation to the work of art; it is now… obliged to order itself by its language, compelled by it to a task of recognition, of reparation, to the task of restoring reason from that unreason and to that unreason… The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is.” Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, New York: Vintage Books, 1973, P. 288-289.
"That is why Van Gogh died suicided, because it was the concerted awareness of society as a whole that could bear him no longer… Besides, one does not commit suicide alone. No one was ever born alone. Nor has anyone died alone. But, in the case of suicide, a whole army of evil beings is needed to force the body to perform the unnatural act of depriving itself of its own life.”
Antonin Artuad, 'Van Gogh The Man Suicided by Society', Artaud Anthology, Ed. Jack Hirschman, 1965, P161-162.
Hello, my name is David Murphy. Those simple words have taken me decades to arrive at. 'CYPHER' a blunt signature of failure, I scrawled in clumsy capital letters upon the most violent and pornographic paintings in Irish art history. My signature – confirmed what the viewer could suspect from my imagery – this was pathological art – this was ‘Panic Art’! ‘Cypher’ was my artistic stamp from April 1991 to January 2009. To break free of my domineer mother – I created an alter-ego that defied my demonic mother and all her values. Also, by naming myself ‘Cypher’ I announced to all those with eyes to see - that I knew I was an artist of no importance and a man of no social prestige or influence, living in a Godless universe without meaning.
This was typical of an artist with a borderline personality disorder with a distorted and disfigured sense of self, prone to hopeless self-loathing, and with no fixed identity. Burdened with ambitions largely beyond my technical or intellectual scope - I lived in embittered isolation and I adopted the defence mechanism of an external alter ego Cypher - to take the responsibility for my failure as an artist and human being.
All this was characteristic of the schizophrenic patient observed by R.D. Laing who declares himself dead to avoid murder or the impotent man who avoids castration by failing to gain an erection. It was a sly game of double bluff - if I could not be the greatest artist - maybe I could be the greatest non-artist (in fact most in the art world have flatly refused to accept my pornographic paintings as art.) Far from becoming the second coming of Pablo Picasso, I became the non-Picasso, the non-man, the non-fucker, the non-lover, the non-entity, the nothing, the zero, and the cypher. If I could not be a genius like Picasso, I would become a genius of failure. And I turned all my faults and failings into a kind on non-art of insanity, irrationalism, inaction, and obscenity. The choice to change my name also had a sexual element related to my adolescent proto-Black Pill-Incel interest in the phenomenon of the eunuch - which at the age of twenty, I felt close to becoming. Never mind feeling inferior to alpha males, I felt worthless in comparison to many modern Western young women who soared on a wave of Feminist political actions, fucked freely and promiscuously, and some of whom held positions of greater power and authority within society and the art world - than I could never hope to achieve. But I also assumed that I was a failure of great importance. Many people have adopted a pseudonym, but few have adopted ones that are self-deprecating and negative like ‘Cypher’ or ‘The Panic Artist’.
Only after my mother’s death in January 2009, did I revert to signing my paintings ‘David Murphy’. I was conscious of being the last of my family and my art could not shame my mother anymore - and if I were to go down, I would go down with my birth name. However, in periods of crisis since, I have been tempted again to revert to signing my work Cypher - because I have not felt worthy of a name.
I am a fifty-three-year-old (b. 1971) isolated, Irish, hardcore expressionist/realist painter, and writer, living and working in Dublin, Ireland. I have never sought to shock people with my art, rather I have sought understanding. However, I am an outcast of the art world and reluctant outsider artist. I have painted since before I can remember, but I have been painting seriously for forty-three years - and my surviving oeuvre contains thirty-seven years worth of paintings and drawings. The greatest artistic influences on my work have been Gothic, Baroque, Romantic, Realist, Expressionist, Neo-Expressionist, and Outsider Art.
A list of my subjects would include self-portrait busts, nude self-portraits, female nudes, kissing couples, erotic scenes, landscapes, gestural abstractions, text paintings and most controversially pornographic scenes including fellatio, cunnilingus, intercourse, and sodomy. However, I paint porn only to project my loneliness, sadness, thwarted desire, and psychosexual despair onto these transgressive images. My pornographic paintings are subversive art, made on the margins of society. My themes would include madness, abandonment, isolation, loneliness, voyeurism, and mediated desire. My signature and the date of my work is signed strikingly in large capital letters in the corner of nearly all my paintings and drawings - a sign of my huge ego and need for recognition. But also, a signal that I had completed the work to my satisfaction.
My work is an anti-social, solipsistic, explosion of uncensored desire, and unregulated emotion. I make art for me and me alone. My early life was fractured by scandal, illegitimacy, death, maternal madness, disassociation, panic attacks, self-loathing, loneliness, anguish, hunger, perversion, constant rejections from women, unhappy love affairs, and virulent rejections from the art world – so my work inclines towards pessimistic nihilism. Unfortunately, I am a mentally ill painter who has failed because I thought I was a genius, I did not work hard enough at my art, I lacked the common humanity great art requires, and my personality was mangled by child abuse and a resulting quite borderline personality disorder. My father suddenly died when I was six and a half, and my malignant narcissistic mother had a complete nervous breakdown. For the rest of her life, she suffered from grand mal epilepsy, and paranoid-schizophrenia. My mother was a pathological liar, highly manipulative, domineering, and extremely violent. From the age of eight until the age of fourteen, my mother viciously emotionally and physically abused me. I also had to care for her, and save her life on numerous occasions, and my heart was broken seeing my mother have repeated epileptic fits, starve herself to death, suffer through migraines, and rant and rave.
My father died when I was six and a half, and my beautiful mother’s world fell apart. For her there was only one man in the whole world – my father. She later confessed to me that she only went on living for me. When my father died, my mother plunged into unspeakable grief, depression and then psychosis. Within eighteen months, she had been committed to a mental hospital (her first incarceration of over two-dozen in my lifetime) suffering from; paranoid-schizophrenia, mania, malnutrition, and addiction to Valium. When I was young, I believed that my mother was being honest when she said that my father's death had caused her to have a mental breakdown. But later in life, I learned that my mother had been wild, aggressive, pathologically jealous, and violent even as a child. As a teenager, she made her younger sisters life a living hell because their father had shifted his affection from my mother to her younger sister. My mother was a malignant narcissist long before she came down with paranoid-schizophrenia.
My mother loved me with every inch of her heart, but she was a cold narcissistic woman, and our relationship was a very difficult one. My mother was never a maternal woman, nor did she have a love for children, and I never remember her giving me an physical affection. Before my father's death, it had been au-pairs, a nanny, and my aunt that had cared for me. And after my father's death, and my mother's alienation from the world, I was left to look after her, and raise myself.
My early experience of living with my tyrannical and demonic mentally ill mother forever warped my sexuality. Because of what my mentally ill mother did to me, I came to associate love with pain, and associate women not with maternal affection, gentility, or tenderness - but torment, terror, humiliation and hurt. When my mother was well, she was devoted and caring, yet also highly controlling. She told me that no woman would ever love me as much as she did, and she later hated my first girlfriend Helen because she came between us.
Between 1979-1985 my mother totally neglected me. Throughout my life, my mother lied to me constantly, and prevented anyone getting close to me. She constantly neglected me, gave me almost no instructions on life, and homophobically bullied me. She constantly told me that other people were evil, and not to be trusted. Anytime I did see my family, she would psychotically interrogate me and attack me for liking them. She repeatedly destroyed gifts given to me by my family. Frequently, she would wake me up in the middle of the night and pace my bedroom and force me to listen to her paranoid rantings. Or drag me by the hair up to her bedroom and interrogate me for hours. My mother eventually viciously fought with everyone we encountered. She was also highly manipulative and a pathological liar and lied constantly to me and everyone else. Often my mother flirted with me - and made me feel extremely uncomfortable and frightened. On holiday in Spain in 1978, she showed me her breasts and asked me to compare them to those of women I had seen in a Spanish swimming pool. When my au-pair tried to get her to put her bikini top back on she screamed and attacked her and later fired her. Aged ten, my mother beat the crap out of me, after other boy had groomed me to get into bed naked with him and she caught us. She beat me viciously again when she found me with my father’s porn. Meanwhile, she claimed that a man who had befriended us when I was about ten (and I had really liked because he was kind to me) had tried to rape her! So, we never saw him again. She crashed her car with me in it, after having an epileptic fit, and I had to call for help. Time and time again, my mother smashed up things in the house she knew I loved. She sent me out repeatedly to humiliatingly beg for money off our neighbours and once to my family. She asked me to buy her cigarettes when we had no money for food. She sent me to shops to ask for more credit. She asked me to cash checks she knew would bounce. She asked me to go to chemists to get her expired Valium prescription renewed. Several times, she threatened to kill me. Once with a kitchen knife. Or threatened to kill herself. Once she downed a bottle of Valium in front of me - and I had to phone for an ambulance. As a small boy, I was terrified that my mother would kill me in my bed as I slept, and so from my teenage years I obsessively locked my bedroom door, and I continued to do so for the rest of my life. I also lived perpetually terrified that my mother would die in an accident or kill herself. For years my mother pathologically resented my love for art - and the way it allowed me to be briefly free from her control. In late 1983, when I was about twelve and a half, my mother ripped up some of my pastels and drawings and threw them in the fire despite my tearful pleadings. She became enraged when she asked who was the woman in a pastel I had made, of a dark-haired woman nursing a child? And I said it was my half-sister who was in fact blonde! But it was just a version of a Renoir maternity painting. However, I refused to allow my mother to assume control over my art. My mother’s destruction of my drawings, the very symbols of my ‘self’, devastated me. This incident had a profound effect on my later life, because I was incredibly careful what women I drew. Usually, I only drew girls I hardly knew and were at a safe distance, or women whose love I was totally assured of, and I knew I could trust completely. So, throughout my creative life, I had preferred to use appropriated images of women I have never met. Throughout my teenage years my mother constantly tried to stop me pursuing my art and belittled my artistic aspirations. She also often said that I had no talent, and I was not a prodigy. It was only when I got into Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design based on my portfolio and exceptional talent alone - that she accepted my gift. Yet, throughout my life, she was disappointed by me, and constantly waited for me to lose my vocation. As a boy she constantly called me a waster, a faggot, a spoilt brat, and wished she had aborted me at birth. Nor could I even count the number of times she swore she would disown me - after she was about to be committed to a mental hospital. She insisted on bathing me until I was twelve, and repeatedly beat me when I was in the bath. She stripped off naked in front of me when I was thirteen despite my attempts to keep her clothes, then when I ran and got my female neighbour to help me, my mother ran out onto the street and my neighbour had to catch her and bring her inside. I was left absolutely terrified by my first sight of a naked woman. With the result that ever since, I have instinctively responded to any attempt by a woman to flirt with me - with blind panic, defensive obnoxious rudeness, and the desire to flee. And until well into my twenties, I suffered from gynophobia. Then repeatedly when she had been committed to a psychiatric hospital and put on medication, my mother claimed she could not remember anything, and acted as if she was the best mother in the world, or tried to buy my affection with endless gifts and treats – but I felt like a whore accepting them. When she was well, my mother would do anything for me, she was convinced I was destined for greatness, called me a genius, and the most beautiful boy in the world. So, I was both mollycoddled and spoilt by my mother and neglected and abused by her too. But the worst thing of all, was that I still loved her, and knew she loved me with all her heart.
My abuse was compounded by a psychiatric ‘care in the community’ policy that kept releasing my mother back to our home, with little or no power to make her take her medication, and no social worker provided to look after me. So, from 1979-1985, my mother was constantly in and out of hospital. I was also a victim of the Irish idolization of mothers, who were deemed above any criticism or reproach, and whose children were rarely taken off them. Even as an adult, I was silenced by the strong cultural taboo against criticising a mother. So, I never publicly said anything about my childhood, although I wrote it all down in my early twenties and all my friends read it. But, when I just let slip in a TV interview, that my relationship with my mother was “difficult” she was terribly upset. In addition, I was a victim of Feminist propaganda in the 1980s that claimed women could not be abusers, mothers could not psychologically destroy their children, and boys could not be victims. As a child I could not express what was happening to me – because I was terrified of losing my mother and the only life I knew. And I had become terrified of my family and other people because my mother had taught me that they wanted my money and would kill me. Besides, I could not even find the words, or even know where to begin talking about what was happening to me! Meanwhile, my relatives and the professionals I encountered, told me nothing about my mother’s illness or my future, minimised my suffering, made constant excuses for my mother, and refused to take me away from my mother - because frankly she owned me! Yet, none of them could claim innocence to my plight, because my mother was so deranged that she constantly verbally and sometimes physically attacked our relatives, police, doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, etc. I frankly lost count of the number of times the police were called by people to control my mother, or the number of times she was committed. At one point, my mother was even committed to the Central Mental Hospital for the criminally mentally ill in Dundrum, Dublin. Time and time again, as a child I was left defenceless with a woman who terrorised grown adults around her - and who they wanted absolutely nothing to do with. But wow, did they not want my mother near their children! And I ended up losing all my local friends. So, in a world where everything I was suffering was safe, acceptable, and normal - I realised that the only person at fault was me because I was an ugly, stupid, spoilt rich brat, and piece of shit - who nobody loved and did not deserve to live!
Much later as an adult with a girlfriend, and living apart from my mother, I still did not have any peace. Because my mother continued to go through the revolving doors of the psychiatric system until a few months before she died aged sixty-five, in January 2009, and every time she had a crisis – I was plunged back into my primal childhood terror. I felt totally powerless to help her. It was only with my first girlfriend Helen’s love and support, that in my late twenties, I came to forgive my mother and try to rebuild our relationship. Crucially Helen could see first-hand how difficult my mother was to deal with even when she was well, how impossible she was to help when deranged, and how hard it was to get social workers or psychiatric help for her. Helen also saw first-hand the effect it all had on my self-esteem and mental health. I began to realise so much of my dreadful childhood, was the result of the feckless attitude of the Irish psychiatric and social welfare system, which did little to help my mother or myself. My half-brother later observed, that if my mother had not had me, she probably would have died much earlier, because I had given her a reason to live, and enjoy some kind of life. He also said he had never seen anyone so bereft as me at my mother’s funeral - I looked like my whole world had fallen apart. For years, after her death, I continued to paint my mother from my memory, imagination, and old family photographs – unwilling to let her go.
Due to my traumatic childhood - I withdrew into myself - and concentrated on my art to the exclusion of almost everything else. In my art, I found a few inches of paper I could shape and control - free from the nasty world around me. But in compensation for my childhood misery – I developed a grandiose conception of myself as an exceptional artist - out of all proportion to my actual gifts. From an early age, I learned how to dissociate myself from my terrifyingly mentally ill mother, block her out and self-isolate. But I had also spent my childhood being sent out by my mother to beg for money from neighbourhood mothers - or crying for their help when my mother was ill. Which had left me feeling completely depended upon the whims and mercy of women, and as low as a worthless, unwanted dog. As a boy humiliatingly begging from women, shop keepers, and family, shredded what little self-esteem or pride I had left. Then my terror of my mother, was compounded when I was teenager, by the ridicule, verbal abuse, and sexual taunts of some girls in school, and where I lived, and my mother’s low opinion of me seemed to be confirmed by all women in my mind. So, I lived constantly in fear of being ridiculed by girls and was constantly on the defensive. Although I desperately wanted to be loved by girls, I soon discovered that many of them thought I was a weak, pathetic, and ugly wimp of a boy - worthy only of pity and ridicule. So, I made an art of avoiding any contact with girls, and lived my life outside, looking perpetually down at the ground, and I always wore my Walkman to block out the sound of girls and other people. And to this day, I rarely leave my house. I am narcissistic, passive, masochistic, introverted, reclusive, voyeuristic, desperately shy, and very dependent. My first psychiatrist wrote in her report in October 1991, that I was “difficult to have empathy with”. All my life, I felt like a total outsider looking in at the world. And I even felt a stranger to myself.
Unable to flee my mother, or defend myself against her, I was forced to become submissive, dependent, avoidant, and lost in disassociation. I was a nerdy, gaunt, shy, introverted, and deserted boy, frequently bullied by both boys and girls. So, from when my father died in late 1977, I suffered acute anguish, self-loathing, loneliness, and despair. I only survived by turning to drawing, painting, reading, and self-comforting masturbation. I lost myself in my own fantasy world of artistic glory, sexual conquest, and love.
As I have said, I was brought up isolated and alone, by my violently mentally ill mother. Moreover, virtually all my teachers, therapists and psychiatrists were women – so I grew up with virtually no male role models. There are hardly any positive examples for mother/son relationships and plenty like Oedipus and Psycho that shame and terrify. Mother’s boys are considered by many to be sexless nice guys, pathetic hen-pecked wimps, and weirdos. But I felt I had no choice but to look after my mother because we only had each other. I was a victim of my mother’s enmeshment and covert incest. She prematurely awakened my sexuality and left me with deep feelings of shame and guilt. Moreover, she became for me a sexually terrorising demon and left me with a sexual dread of women, and fear of intimacy and love. Worse still, my development was arrested, and I never became the alpha male women desire. In fact, there were many painters who had close, intense, difficult, or traumatic relationships with their mothers like William Turner, Edward Vullard, Maurice Utrillo, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Balthus, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, L. S. Lowry, Andy Warhol, Robert Crumb, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Eric Fischl. However, my insanely Oedipal relationship with my mother makes all the others seem banal and I am the only painter I know who was committed alongside his mother to the same mental hospital! Moreover, I grew up having no idea whatsoever how to be a man - never mind an alpha male. So, when I was aged twenty-one and my second therapist gave me a personality test, she found, I had the lowest self-esteem of any client she had ever had. Four times when I was in my early twenties, I mutilated myself because of a verbal fight with a woman or tried to kill myself, and I cannot even count the number of panic attacks I have had when women have flirted with me. Thus, my artistic rebellion was not against patriarchy – but rather smothering, controlling, judgemental, censoring, terrorising, and emasculating matriarchy! After my mother had viciously punished me for sexual misbehaviour and psychologically dominated me as a child, as well as jealously filled my head with poisonous ideas about the manipulative cruelty, seductive evil and sexual depravity of women – my pornographic art was a revolt against her psychotic puritan control, yet also a subconscious projection of the negative vision of life she had instilled in me. On the other hand, I have always been in awe of women, put them on a pedestal, and always relied on the kindness of women. Moreover, I loathe most men especially macho pigs.
My work was also a rebellion against the Nationalistic, Catholic, right-wing, provincial, and paternalistic Ireland - I grew up repressed under. I loathed the complacent conservatism of the Irish art world, conformism of Irish society, and conspiracy of silence that surrounded sex in Ireland. Living in Ireland in the 1980s and early 1990s, was like living in a time warp in which the Irish were living in the 1950s - while the rest of Europe and America were living in the late twentieth century. Political, economic, social, sexual, and artistic revolutions that were taken for granted in the rest of the West were still treated like abominable evils in Ireland. Growing up in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, I was a surrounding by an extremely negative culture of religious intolerance and bigotry; social begrudgery, and poisonous envy; artistically backward ignorance and stupidity; and sexual repression, prudery, and hypocrisy. When I was young, I was acutely sensitive to criticism, so when people criticised my personality, art, or sexuality, I felt acutely belittled and ashamed. But looking back now, I have learned that most of these people knew absolutely nothing about art, they were nobodies of no importance, and they were rank sexual hypocrites. However, the damage to me had been done.
At the time, Ireland was a Roman Catholic theocracy, and one of the most socially conservative nations in Western Europe and it had moral restrictions on almost every aspect of life, the most draconian anti-sex legislation, and strictest censorship laws in the EU. From 1989-1995, I smuggled pornography home from abroad at a time when possession or display of pornography in Ireland was illegal. Irish attitudes to sex were medieval in their morbid shame, hatred of the flesh, and demonization of sexual women and perverted men. Having spent a lifetime being simultaneously terrorised, lectured and hectored about sexuality by my mother, other older women, female teachers, female Catholic fanatics, female friends, and angry Irish Feminists - I became disgusted by the hypocrisy of Irish women. In society and on Irish TV, Irish women hysterically denounced Irish men’s animalist lust, perversion, and sexism, and pretended they were high and mighty Virgin Marys. Yet at night in Dublin every weekend, many of them acted like drunken sluts. Thus, my expressive and pornographic art, was my revenge upon childhood silencing, gaslighting, deceit, repression, and hypocrisy.
As a teenager, I suffered badly from an Oedipus complex (an inability to break my dependency on my mother) well into my mid-twenties. I spent my abused childhood and traumatic teenage years, biting my tongue, afraid to anger my mother, or my foster families, and disassociating myself from the world. I was nearly completely silent about what was happening to me from the age of six and a half, until I first tried to kill myself at twenty. At the time, I had no idea how I had turned out the way I had, why I hated myself and life so much, or why I wanted to die. I did not even have the language to express how I felt. But I realised my secrets were killing me like a poison, and since then I have never been able to shut up! The only things that made me cry for help, during my multiple suicide attempts between October 1991 and January 1994, was my sudden mood swings, cowardice, and deluded artistic ambition.
As I have mentioned, as a result of my childhood, I have an incurable mental illness, and the best I can do is manage my condition. But until my late twenties, I had no insight into my condition, self-awareness, or understanding of how disturbed I was. Because I was never given a diagnosis, and I had to use the Freedom of Information Act to access my psychiatric files, to find out that I had a borderline personality disorder. Since then I have spent decades studying my condition in psychiatric and psychological manuals, and online. Unfortunately, as a high functioning sufferer of BPD, people often do not think there is anything wrong with me, they think I am attention seeking - and so they are horrified when they see my art.
Living with borderline personality disorder is often a living hell. Because of my incurable borderline personality disorder, I am very intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically disturbed. I suffer constant bouts of rage followed by shame, and this is reflected in my artworks. In many ways, my entire oeuvre has been a relentless process of self-interrogation, manic confession, self-exposure, self-trashing, self-mortification, and self-flagellation. I am a confession machine! I have also suffered from intense love-shyness, gynophobia, toxic shame, chronically low self-esteem, and masochism most of my life. I suffer almost hourly swings from elation to despair, grandiosity to self-loathing, horniness to shame, and creativity to emptiness - and then back again. It is frankly exhausting, and my emotions are a chaotic hourly helter-skelter! I live with a constant identity crisis, which I have often tried to escape by overidentifying with my artistic heroes, but it has often resulted in me merely pastiching, conceptually tracing, and plagiarising their work. I am emotionally disturbed, immature, hypersexual, and I have an acute persecution complex. I also have an eating disorder and sleep disorder. My disturbing self-loathing is evident in much of my art - even if it is not immediately evident in me personally. I have a fractured, and distorted sense of self, which is reflected in my constantly changing artistic styles. Not only do I not have a consistent artistic style - even many of my individual artworks contain cognitive dissonance. So, my oeuvre is almost as stylistically varied as Picasso, and even more stylistically diverse than painters like Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, and Julian Schnabel.
My partner Carol calls me a binge painter. I can spend weeks depressed and unable to even draw a stick figure. I even begin to think I have lost whatever talent I have - and I will never be able to make art again. So, I just read art books, write, and look at art and porn for subjects to inspire me. Then suddenly without thinking, I furiously make dozens of artworks in the space of a few weeks - in a state of unconscious bliss. I am never happier than when I am painting, and I am in the flow – it is better than drugs or sex! Frequently, I have to out pace my self-doubt, and self-loathing. After which, I am plunged back again into despair and research.
I had my first panic attacks as a child, and constantly as a teenager, but I had so many of them, I did not know that they were abnormal. In my twenties, my panic attacks became even worse, especially when girls tried to chat with me - or even worse if girls flirted with me. I frankly preferred girls to avoid me, or hate my rudeness - than desire me. Yet, alone in my bedroom/studio, I was consumed by romantic and sexual fantasises. Until the age of twenty-one, I was merely friendly to women, but I avoided them like the plague in the Rock Clubs where I regularly went to let off my despair dancing ecstatically, or letting off my rage moshing. Then I had my first kisses and sex with prostitutes in Amsterdam - because I could not approach normal women, due to my horrific fear of rejection. During my three trips alone to Amsterdam in 1992-3, I was frankly happier than I had ever been, because I was free from the need to find a girlfriend. It was the beautiful prostitutes in Amsterdam who saved my life. Later, I spent a few years pretending to myself I was gay, because I found love in the arms of my first boyfriend, and because it relieved me of the anguish of heterosexual desire - and my fear of women. I called myself The Panic Artist not only as a comment on Post-Modern cultural panic, but also as a personal confession.
Because of my childhood, I also suffer from an avoidant personality disorder, vulnerable narcissistic personality disorder, and an acute obsessive-compulsive disorder. My OCD resulted in my obsession with artistic productivity, and vain attempts to beat Picasso’s prodigiousness and productivity; my obsession with collecting as many books and catalogues on Picasso, Schiele, Basquiat, and Schnabel as I could afford, and my constant counting up of their oeuvres; my sexual OCD and constant self-comforting masturbation followed by intense shame and guilt, and which was triggered by my mother’s flirting with me, sexual exposure, sexual punishment, and physical abuse; and my confessional obsession which was a result of my moral scrupulosity OCD.
My monastic, shut-in, and voyeuristic pornography and the extreme nature of my art is a result of my attempt to develop a language that could express; the pain I felt after being ravaged by childhood abuse, neglect, and isolation; my alienation from humanity; my tortured masculinity; and the apocalypse of my soul. My art and writing are both forms of nihilistic polemic. A puritan pornographer, I am completely alien to art history, and there are few artists with whom I can even be compared. Most of my pornographic, erotic, and pathological artworks subliminally reveal my traumatic and repressed childhood. They are certainly not the work of an oversexed sensualist, or predator, in fact they express the obsessions of a deeply repressed and inhibited man. My tragic pornographic paintings were the work of a disappointed idealist, romantic, and sentimentalist. My brooding obsessional pornographic, erotic, and pathological art is entirely circumscribed by my fears and anxiety. I make my porn paintings for my own satisfaction and therapeutic catharsis - not for public exhibition. Perversely, although I make erotic and pornographic art – I am influenced by hardly any erotic or pornographic art, because with a few exceptions like Schiele and Picasso I find such work kitsch, simplistic and technically sub-standard. On the other hand, although I am stylistically influenced by many expressive artists, my content is derived from hardcore pornography, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and alternative music. The nearest artist to me was the equally transgressive, alienated, and unique Egon Schiele. Although artists from the 1990’s played games with pornography and told jokes about sex - only I fully embodied porn, pathologized it, and thus made it even more extreme.
Paradoxically, I have always been abjectly ashamed of my sexuality and my pornographic art has been a grandiose attempt to overcompensate for my guilt, shame, and repression. I am a puritan pornographer - painting the unpaintable. I always believed that I had to sacrifice my life for my art. And that meant staying at home all the time, painting as much as I could, and spending every spare penny on my art materials and art books. The more I limited my life outside, the more exceptionally intense my art became. So, the less I lived, the lonelier I became, the more I pined for love, the less I fucked in real life - the more powerful and intense my pornographic paintings became. Moreover, I have only been able to produce such a mass of pornographic artworks, because I have spent extraordinarily little of my life chasing young women, socialising with them, and even less time having sex with them. For me, porn is far cheaper, less emotionally damaging, and less time consuming than getting involved with most real women.
The artists I most admire have been skilful and dramatic draughtsmen, emotive colourists, and painterly painters. The artists I value the most are those that have dealt with the human condition. My artistic heroes are Pablo Picasso, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vincent van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
I do not have a single qualification to my name, I have never had a real job, and I am largely self-taught as an artist, and entirely self-taught as a writer and intellectual. I started reading art history books aged ten, as well as practical guides to drawing and painting materials and techniques. From the age of ten, I was frequently truant from school, and I would got to my local library to read books, or to the National Gallery of Ireland where I looked at the paintings and drew from them. Later, in my teenage years, I would bunk off school, and go to the Hugh Lane Gallery, or around the private galleries in Dublin. My formal art education, such as it is, consisted of a series of night classes taken intermittently over the course of twenty years. From the age of thirteen to fifteen (1983-1985), I learned to paint in watercolours and oils with private tutors, then from my early twenties I did life drawing and painting classes in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin between 1992-1994 and 2003-2004. I also attended life-drawing sessions in the City Arts Centre and Trinty College. Moreover, I had one ill-disciplined year in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design from 1989-90, where I was accepted based on exceptional talent. But my depression and social anxiety prevented me from preforming to the level I had hoped. Frankly, I was torn between staying in the safety of my bedroom/studio, lost in my own fantasy world, or attending Art College merely to prove to my family that I was not a deluded waster. So, I was a lazy and detached student in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design, and I worked harder on my personal and private painting at home than the rote dross I did in Art College. The subjects I painted at home included self-loathing, nude self-portraits, and sinister erotic scenes. For a totally deluded young man, who thought he was a child prodigy, and the second coming of Pablo Picasso, it was humiliating to realise I could not even compete with my mediocre classmates in the backwater of Dublin in 1989 - never mind the young Picasso! Then I got into trouble after a physical fight with another young man in my year. Meanwhile, I was so ashamed of my shyness, naivety, and virginity amongst so many girls with older boyfriends, who boasted about their drunken escapades, that I pretended that I had a girlfriend studying art history in Trinity College! Thus, barely attending Art College, I dismally failed my first year and I was expelled. My mother frantically phone the principal of Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design asking them to give me another chance but he declared “We don’t want bedroom artists in our Art College! We want artists that can take their place in the real world!” However, I realised that I did not give a damn about the pursuit of mere technical competency, theoretical posturing, faddish experimentation, or indeed any form of academic or socially motivated art. For me, art only had meaning as a personal expression of myself, as a form of therapy, and an existential questioning of life. Kicked out of art college, I vowed to become a great artist almost as an act of revenge.
When I tried to get back into art college in early June 1993, one of my applications to the Dublin Institute of Technology, College of Marketing Art and Design was rejected, and they told my mother that my work was “the most violent and pornographic they had ever seen”. By then it was my fourth rejection from a Dublin Art College. I subsequently tried to kill myself twice by overdose a few weeks later. Other submissions I made to the National College of Art and Design in 1994 and 2004 were also rejected. My constant rejections from Dublin Art Colleges increased my derangement.
As an anarchistic, existential, expressionist, my work is also a rejection of every art world orthodoxy since the 1960s from; Marxism to Feminism, left-wing aesthetics, philosophy and politics, the dictatorship of linguistics, Neo-Academic Conceptual, Performance, Installation and New Media Art, factory and foundry made art, careerism, political correctness, artistic activism, progressive political art and totalitarian Liberal groupthink. Having grown up in a Republic of lies, been lied to constantly by mother and other adults, having my abuse minimised and excused, and being immersed for decades in the idealistic fantasies of High Art, I do not give a damn how others want the world to be - I am only interested in what it is really like. In a world glutted with fake people, positive-thinking, virtue signalling, and commercial hype – I make an art of abject self-loathing, catastrophic honesty, and nihilism. Besides, I have always been convinced that we were in the end of days, and the intellectual bankruptcy, moral degeneracy, and rotten decadence of the Western world - was the last orgy before the apocalypse.
Since the age of sixteen, I have only ever used artist quality materials, even though they cost more than twice the price of student materials. I have a romantic relationship to my art and materials, with is an expression of myself and my talent with all their flaws. I am intoxicated by the expressive, evocative, poetic, and imaginative power of oils, watercolour, pastels, and traditional drawing techniques. Thus, my mediums are mostly defiantly old-fashioned; pencil, brush and ink, pastels, watercolours, alkyds, acrylics and oils and I use them in a manner the Expressionists over a hundred years ago would have recognised. What matters to me is individual creativity, personal vision and traditional qualities of craftsmanship, skill, authenticity, necessity, and accountability. For me, an artwork is validated by its manual skill, emotional authenticity, originality, and transgressive power. As such I am virulently anti-Modernist. However, I have had to fight tooth and nail, to express my own very private vision against artistic and social norms.
All my life I suffered from bouts of chronic depression and disturbing lack of self-confidence. My mother's early constant belittling of my art, my families opposition and hostility to me becoming an artist, and my mother's destruction of some of my drawings when I was twelve, made me hide my art under my bed for most of my teenage years. Apart from my few applications to Art Colleges - I hardly showed my art to anyone. As I painted more and more personal, confessional, and sexual work, I became even more paranoid and fearful. Moreover, my fear of people, and terror of rejection, not only prevented me trying to court women, it also prevented me showing my art to other people. It was only in my early twenties, when I began socialising with fringe members of the Dublin art world, that some championed my art, and they brought it around art galleries on my behalf. However, my work was constantly rejected. Moreover, like with women, I preferred to alienate art world people, than actually try to persuade or charm them. Later, my first girlfriend Helen, would also bring photo albums of my art around art galleries for me. They eventually managed to get me several exhibitions - but I collected many more rejections. Later, I went twice to London and applied to four art galleries only to be rejected by them all. My constant rejections from almost everyone in the art world was soul destroying. In 1996, I sent a submission to an art gallery in New Work by FedEx only to be rejected. In 1999, I sent another submission by FedEx to a Paris art gallery and I was again rejected. For weeks after my rejections, I was suicidally depressed and unable to paint. From 2005-2008, I sent numerous email submissions linked to my website to art galleries in London and New York only to be rejected. So, after my mother’s death in 2009, and my subsequent grief and mental breakdown - I withdrew again from the world to preserve my sanity. I also gave up trying to achieve art world recognition. Having received over 99 rejections from art galleries and curators around the world - I stopped giving them the satisfaction of turning me down. I have not applied for a grant, or approached a gallery or arts group since early 2011, and I have not attended any art opening since the start of 2017, and I only did then because my partner Carol was in the exhibition. Nor have I asked a single art world person to come and view my artwork in my house since the end of March 2007. Carol is the only person in real life I show my work to. But despite my alienation, I continue to paint more than ever with the freedom of the damned - if only as a form of delusional hobby and privileged therapy.
As I aged, I became increasingly misanthropic, anti-social, nihilistic, and disgusted by the decadent, corrupt, manipulative, and hypocritical sham of the art world, contemporary art and its gang of hustlers, mercenaries, and imposters. I loathe the theme parks art galleries have become, their hypocritical political-correctness, their virtue signalling, and their total commercialism. Contemporary art today is so rigged, and it ‘standards’ so arbitrary, ambiguous and contradictory - that almost any claim can be made for the politically-correct elect and almost any denigration levelled at those deemed unworthy and deplorable. Thus, success in art today, is usually the triumph of con-artists in a totally corrupt contest - whose rules are constantly changing to suit the mob or the élite. I grew up worshiping art and thought that being an artist was the most noble profession in the world. I also foolishly thought women would love me for being an artist. But now I realise that most people do not give a fuck about art - and many women only want handsome, powerful, dumb brutes. Most women interested in art, are only interested in female artists, or want to be an artist themselves. And it seems that most women in the art world have a deep animus towards male artists and seek revenge for women's historical marginalization. Besides, young women today are so self-absorbed and narcissistic, that they only want to talk about themselves, and photograph themselves ad nauseum. So, I am now also disgusted by ‘Art’, and apart from a handful of Old, Modern and Contemporary Masters - I do not give a damn about ‘Art’. I want virtually nothing to do with the art world - and I have nothing to give it.
At heart, I am an expressionist artist; my art is the very opposite of 'arts for art’s sake', in fact I see no separation between my art and my life, both feed from each other to form a highly personal and autobiographical art. My approach to art is distinctly expressionist in character - my work tells stories about the human condition – which most can recognise and read – even if they cannot identify with it. Unlike other expressive painters whose expressionism is merely a form of stylistic filter they apply to anything and everything – my expressionism emanates from the subjects I paint - making it even more extreme. That is why, there is frequently a massive adrenaline drop in the intensity of my landscapes and still-lives, compared to my abstracts and female nudes, and especially my self-portraits and pornographic scenes. I am remorselessly self-critical, and my work is obsessed with the 'self' and the 'other' represented by the world. The fiction of me as a primitive outcast exploding with painterly rage, remorse, and anguish fuels my art and forms its identity.
I have used masturbation since my childhood and porn since my adult life to rid myself of desire for real women - if only for a few hours. Porn for me, has always been a flight from real women. Because I have always struggled with low-self-esteem and lack of self-confidence, I fear women and find it hard to trust them, I fear intimacy, and I have performance anxiety. So, I prefer digital women to real women. And because of my self-loathing, sexual inadequacy, castration complex, performance anxiety, terror of women, use of anti-depressants, and unhealthy lifestyle, I have struggled with impotency my whole life. In fact, I have not had actual sex since the start of 2011, and frankly - I do not care if I ever have it again. For a man, chronically low self-esteem, and borderline personality disorder, not only mean constant despair, they also often mean sexual inadequacy and impotency. Moreover, now as a middle-aged porn user, I often have porn induced impotency even when I wank, after years of edging to porn, and the boredom of having seen most it all before. But I still paint porn because painting porn for me has always been about my impotence! I now think sex has almost nothing to do with love, and while it can sometimes be an expression of love, it is mostly just animalistic rutting, or it is often about politically incorrect power dynamics, and cruel and wicked psychological games. Moreover, some men and many women, use terms like ‘love’, ‘romance’ and ‘lovemaking’, to disguise the dark reality of their subconscious desires.
Therefore, besides making extreme artworks of women, my oeuvre is far more notable for its awe and terror of women, male fragility, and its visual lexicon of male passivity, submission, and masochism in its many forms. For example in 1991, I often alluded to myself as a eunuch, and entitled several paintings ‘eunuch’, my work also featured images of auto-castration, as well as symbolism redolent of a castration complex - which reflected my sexually repressed nature. Throughout my oeuvre there have been; images of mutilated or castrated penises; countless images of mature dominant women; skinny young men with voluptuous older women; manifestations of the female gaze; clothed females/naked male scenes; gangs of women leering at male strippers; women giving blowjobs to male strippers; women as aggressors, women screaming violently, forceful women kissing men, powerful women fucking men on top, weak men preforming cunnilingus; submissive men being pissed on by cruel women; subservient men licking women’s feet or shoes; and schizophrenogenic mothers, phallic mothers, dark mothers, femme fatales, psychotic bad boy aping liberated women, pornographic goddesses, party girls, heart-breaking beauties, divine angels, dominatrixes, and cuckoldresses. My oeuvre is a visual diary of my sexuality as it has gone through episodes of romantic idealism, lust, disgust, desire, fear, rage, longing, castration terror, shame, defiance, fantasies of masochistic submission and self-destruction, phallic power, cockiness, distress, and disillusionment. And although my artworks display some aggressive sex, it is nothing in comparison to what is out there in porn, and there are no images of women being physically abused or raped, and most of the violence in my art is directed toward myself. Personally, I like passionate and enthusiastic participation of women in my personal life, during sex, in porn and in the artworks I make. On the other hand, I have been a man in crisis my whole life, and so I have tried to give shape to men’s primal fear of liberated, empowered and sexually voracious women, as well as my own wounded masculinity.
Throughout my life, I have appalled many women and angered many men when I have told them that I paint pornographic paintings. It is in fact one of the first things I honestly and directly tell people - along with all the other dreadful things about me. I have experienced this moral outrage not only from narrow-minded working-class and middle-class people who know nothing about art, but also from supposedly Liberal arty people. I have had to constantly over-explain my art and artistry to people, who doubted I was even an artist! To be one of the few men to admit that he not only looks at porn but makes art about, it has turned me into a social pariah and outcast in the art world. Porn I have learned, is the only thing that can devalue art. And the obscener an artwork is, the less commercially, socially, morally, politically and humanistically valued it becomes. Constantly, people who frankly suspect me of the worst kind of character, have demanded that I provide a justification for my art or asked me snide, loaded questions about my pornographic art. I also discovered that there are so many other ways for cunning people to voice their disapproval of me and my art other than outright honest declarations of hate or censorship. All my life, people jumped down my throat for getting one aspect of a drawing or word wrong in a text - because no matter how small an error, they would attack me for that too! And they would criticize my work for things like my influences, style, or technique, which they blithely ignored in art that did not upset them. In fact, trying to avoid a direct confrontation or debate, they would think of every excuse under the sun, to tell me why they wanted nothing to do with my art – apart from the obvious reasons. Such people cannot fathom why anyone would glorify such immoral people or have any interest in such trashy taboo imagery. I find it a pointless question to try to answer, because those who ask it – have already made up their minds on the basis of religious, aesthetic, Feminist or Liberal moral cant. And these self-righteous liars have no intention of being honest about their own sexuality or relationship to porn.
There is no one reason why I paint porn, my motivations are multi-faceted, and I may never know the real reason myself. Contrary to what most people would assume – I do not paint porn to shock - especially because I started painting porn long before I had any audience to shock, and I hid them in portfolios the minute I had completed them, and they stayed there, unseen for years. And frankly the skill, depth, complexity, and perseverance of my pornographic work is the best rebuke to that fatuous claim. I do not paint porn to make money or advance my career, because I know my porn paintings are virtually unsaleable, unexhibitable, and are an anathema to Liberal/Feminist curators. Nor do I paint porn to arouse myself or others. Or to celebrate sexuality - in fact, sex for me is a horror and a few women are demons. Moreover, hardly anything I have ever painted represented my real sex life – it merely recorded mass media porn images - I consumed and I was obsessed by (the exceptions were some quick sketches of myself with prostitutes, nudes of my lovers Edward, Helen, and Carol, and much later depiction of myself as a young man in Amsterdam with prostitutes made from memory.) Just a few of the reasons I paint porn include; as a nihilistic expression of Eros when I was most suicidal and haunted by Thanatos; as a rage filled hyper-masculine revolt against maternal domination and psychological castration; as a visual display of ‘the erotic’s of agony’; as a transformation of the ‘trash’ of porn and my base desires – into artistic beauty and gold; as a collection of porn goddesses, my only companions in empathy, truth and damnation; as an attempt to surmount my terror of psychotic bad boy mimicking liberated women by painting them obsessively; to subconsciously mirror my mother’s psychosis - in the almost-psychotic faces of porn actresses and amateur sluts and their terrorizing gazes; as a form of cathartic exorcism; as a projection of my fears and container for my pain; as a perverse compensation for a fearful life of limited social contact, intimacy or love; as a metaphor for loneliness and alienation and the cruelty of existence; as projected self-portraits of myself as a sexual woman; as a tearing down of the theatrical walls of art to expose the obscenity of life; as a kind of visual, philosophical virtual-brothel - the most concentrated and explicit form of society in media; as a continuation of the erotic art of the likes of Pablo Picasso and Egon Schiele; as a supreme technical, intellectual and emotional challenge; as revenge upon the art world that rejected me; as a rebellion against the art market; as an assault on suffocating bourgeois good taste and morality; as retribution against the idealism, fantasies and lies of High Art; as a rebuke to disinterested aesthetics and the reduction of art to mere techniques and faddish signature styles; as retaliation against the censorious humanitarian lies of the Liberal media and Feminist propaganda; and ultimately, as a symbol of my outsider and outcast status. Thus, in my pornographic paintings, I make the tragic erupt in obscene imagery and turn pornographic images into records of my state of mind. You might even say, that far from being a hedonistic pornographer – I am a nihilistic, apocalyptic, Alt-Right moralist.
As a contemporary painter of porn stars (the twenty-first century mediated equivalent of Baudelaire’s whores) I am entranced by the pornographic ‘frenzy of the visible’. Because as Baudelaire observed: “[The whore] is a perfect image of the savagery that lurks in the midst of civilisation. She has her own sort of beauty, which comes to her from Evil always devoid of spirituality… In that vast picture-gallery which is life in London or Paris, we shall meet with all the various types of fallen womanhood – of woman in revolt against society – at all levels… Some of these [whores], examples of an innocent and monstrous self-conceit, express in their faces and their bold, uplifted glances an obvious joy at being alive (and indeed, one wonders why). Sometimes, quite by chance, they achieve poses of a daring and nobility to enchant the most sensitive of sculptors, if the sculptors of today were sufficiently bold and imaginative to seize upon nobility wherever it was to be found, even in the mire… in a foggy, gilded chaos, whose very existence is unsuspected by the chaste and the poor, we assist at the Dervish dances of macabre nymphs and living dolls whose childish eyes betray a sinister glitter…” (Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, London: Phaidon, 1995, P. 36-38.) Those who attack me as a misogynistic artist unconcerned about the socio-political reasons behind the vulgar carnality of psychotic liberated women and porn stars - are missing the point of my art. My pornographic expressive and anti-social art is created to release my roiling feelings and unload my psychosexual pain into my artworks - without censorship and regardless of what those responses are, without self-consciousness, and without trying to please or accommodate anyone else. Thus, my art transgresses the three greatest venerable idols of Western civilization – art, motherhood, and womankind. So of course, my pornographic and anti-social art is offensive to just about everybody - especially those people whose primary concern is the correct moral and ideological stance. That is why my work can simultaneously offend men and women, decadents and aesthetes, hedonists and puritans, misogynists and Feminists, and pornographers and censors! Women are angered that I have revealed and glorified the sexual debauchery of some women, and men are angered that I have exposed their primal fear of women and castration, and their resulting terrified denigrating of women if they are sexually free and empowered. More importantly, my work totally exposed the schizophrenic unreality of the ancient Madonna/whore complex with its absurd notions that women should conceive without sex, or at best not enjoy it, and that any woman who has sex and enjoys it is automatically a whore. And its even more unrealistic Feminist rewriting as the Madonna/Madonna forced by men to be a whore complex, and the notion of the ‘male gaze’ which cunningly shifted the blame from women who act up sexually to men who look at them! Saying men like to look at sexy women and have the pathology of predators is frankly a lot easier in today’s politically correct world, where all the blame for sex in the West is put upon men, than trying to explain the dark psychology of female attention seeking, exhibitionism, and sexual submission to alpha males.
I had minor solo exhibitions in Dublin in a grotty media centre in 1994, in a shabby anarchist bookshop in 1996, and in a pub in 1997. Then in 2000 and 2002, I had two major shows in the Oisín Gallery in Dublin - but before and since I have had mostly rejections - many of them extremely disgusted and dismissive. And six of those rejections were from the Oisín Gallery who turned against my art once they found there was no market for it. Despite the initial pleasure of being able to buy more art materials, pleasing my mother, and proving my numerous critics wrong - in the long run my involvement with the Oisín Gallery proved to be the worst thing that had ever happened to me as an artist. I had spent my life fighting for my creative independence, and I had done everything to preserve my authenticity. But getting involved with the Oisín Gallery, resulted in my whole artistic identity being undermined. Constantly criticised for my extreme nude self-portraits and pornographic work and pressurised to paint commercial PG rated work - I underwent a chronic identity crisis. Yet, even when I did try to please the gallery and my critics I failed. Despite finishing with the Oisín Gallery in late 2004, it took me a further three or four years before I recovered my artistic self-belief. Moreover, my brief few weeks of fame left me feeling deeply conflicted, dirty, a sell-out and media whore. The way my worthless and reviled art was suddenly considered a commercial product completely bewildered me. I was revolted by the sight of myself on TV and my name in print. I was also disgusted with how many people’s (especially women’s) contempt for me and my art, suddenly changed overnight, when I had some success and sales, ex female lovers came out of the woodwork, and women flew around me like moths to a flame in a way they never had before. However, the Oisín Gallery had no standing in the Irish art world, because it was just a commercial gallery that sold kitsch landscapes, that appealed to the totally uninitiated and uneducated art public - but not remotely to connoisseurs, critics, art students or bohemian contemporary artists. So, no one in the real Irish art world even considered it a proper gallery and they refused to touch my art with a bargepole. Moreover, my brief fame and financial success could not free me from the agony of my borderline personality disorder - only a total reordering of my whole personality could have achieved that.
Long before cancel-culture, and no-platforming, I was blacklisted in the Irish art world. My art has been attacked as adolescent, immature, revolting, insane, violent, ugly, sick, filthy, stylistically inconsistent, raw, obscene, degrading, sexist, misogynistic, exploitative, unacceptable, appalling - or simply not art. The slurs ‘immature’ and ‘adolescent’ made by art world insiders against my early work, were loaded attacks not just against me, but also against any young person in Ireland who dared to express themselves, question the authority of adults, or expose the hypocrisy of Ireland, instead of becoming a ‘mature’ conformist adult. They were put downs made by Irish people who believed that children should be seen and not heard, and who did not give a dam about the lives of the young. They were also typical of a tiny country whose social stability was assured for centuries by the mass emigration of its troublesome youths, in which there were practically no youth movements, and the media was mostly dominated by right-wing, ultra-Catholic, elderly voices and a smug, middle-class, conformist world view.
Others pretended not to be shocked, and said my work was boring! At my first official exhibition in The Garden of Delights anarchist bookshop in 1996, I was ganged up on, by a bunch of angry men who demanded I “explain myself”, and berated me for being elitist, ambitious, and wanting to make money from my art! I had never thought making money from art was a crime - but I had done nothing to make saleable or acceptable art. These so-called radicals turned out to be mostly bitter, envious crypto-Fascists and reactionary crypto-Catholics. The only thing they conceded, was that I was not a coward. But why I had to be subjected to their bullying bile - just to prove I was not a coward - was beyond me. For nearly an hour, these scorpions surrounded me and verbally attacked everything about me (notably, apart from my porn paintings) before finally at the end, a few grudgingly admitted they did not think pornography, or my kind of art should be allowed to exist! During my major exhibitions in 2000 and 2002, I was scapegoated in the Irish press as sad sicko - as though I was the only man or woman in Ireland who had ever had sex never mind looked at porn. But my observations on the crisis of masculinity, modern liberated women, or Western decadent society were hardly mentioned never mind investigated. Instead, I was treated as a unique alien weirdo. To make matters worse for my critics was the fact that I was plainly skilled enough to create beautiful conventional paintings - but I chose to use my talent to paint porn! Almost worse than my critics, was the fact that virtually no one came to my defence, and my demonization was greeted with silence. Furthermore, when I have brought up my history of spiteful rejections in my writings – I have been told I have a persecution complex! Yet, they are only the rejections I have received from the art world. My life has been filled with people silently judging me, avoiding me, cross-examining me, projecting shame on me, ridiculing me, or verbally attacking me because of my art. Ironically, it has often been the worst sluts and perverts who have attacked me and my art the most viciously - as they projected their own shame upon me.
On the other hand, those who were fans of my art but did not know me personally, were disappointed, and shocked I was so introverted, timid, and lacking in self-confidence. I was clearly not the dark self-confident, dominant, alpha male, super-predator they expected or desired! Worse still were the deviants and whores who totally misread my work and thought it was an affirmation of them! Moreover, little written about me by others – friend or foe, has ever given me any real insights into my art because most of it was a projection of the writers’ own issues and couched in such defensive and self-exculpatory language as to be pure bullshit. At the time, I naïvely thought that I was only critically treated the same way every other Irish or international artist was treated. And as a lover of art criticism and honesty, I thought it only fair.
Only over time, reading countless reviews on other far less talented and original artists, and seeing the sycophantic way they were treated – because they had the right victim identity, obeyed Woke clichés, virtue signalled, and made harmless, clichéd Neo-Academic, Neo-Salon, or Zombie-Neo-Mannerist pap - did the penny drop! Years later, my ex-Edward wondered, if I had been a better looking and charming alpha male, if people would have taken so much dislike and offense to me and my art? Carol thought, that if I were a female artist, my success would have been manufactured by the Feminist/Liberal art élite, and I would have been really championed, hyped, and venerated - the way so many female artists, who painted porn long after me were. They were given exhibitions of their decorative, prettified, and superficial porn, in the very same blue-chip art galleries and prestigious museums that had rejected me so dismissively. And while I was demonized, they were called courageous, sexy, and original - and their paintings were sold for prices I could not even dream of! But Carol also thought the main reason I had failed was because I refused to lie. So, I have become so disillusioned by people and the art world, that I am happier living alone with my beloved girlfriend Carol.
Yet since May 2000, I have sold over €61,766 worth of art. But I have not sold a single artwork since mid-December 2012. The highest price paid for one of my paintings was €10,792 (The Dialectic of Emotions 1995 - sold in the Oisín Gallery in November 2000.) The average price for one of my works has been around €550 - 1,500. My art is in corporate and private collections in America, Ireland, England, and Australia. However, of all my sales, only two were for hardcore pornographic works, the previously mentioned large oil painting The Dialectic of Emotions from 1995 and the Indian ink drawing Numbing My Ego from 1997 for €450. However, I have not sold anything since the end of 2011. In 2005, I also received €1,400 in for the film option rights to my autobiography The Panic Artist. But the option expired, and the film was never made. Because the film maker said I was “too passive a character”. And he wanted me to do things in the film that I had never done in my real life, like fall in love with a prostitute, or vandalise the art of other artists in an art gallery!
To date my oeuvre contains over 4,922 paintings (acrylics, watercolours, oils, alkyds, mixed-media, collages, pastels, or gouaches – mostly on 140lb/300gsm watercolour paper) and over 3,505 drawings (pencil, ink, coloured pencils, chalks, charcoal, or permanent markers – mostly on 140lb/300gsm watercolour paper.) I have also produced 4 sculptures, 27 mono-prints, 15 scrapbooks with examples of art I admire and 78 notebooks with over 3,500 sketches. I have also taken thousands of documentary and family photographs, but I do not consider myself a photographer. I am merely a documenter of my own life and working practices.
Given the Romantic, expressive, experimental approach I take to drawing and painting, I edit my output a lot - especially as I grow older. My surviving oeuvre represents only those works that have survived my own self-critical destruction. On average, I have destroyed about 20% of my initial artwork production. All my artworks including my mono-prints are handmade, unique, one-off pieces - made entirely by myself without assistants or technicians and with the best artist quality materials. However, of 4,921 paintings only around 260 or about 6.3% of them are on canvas, board or found objects - the rest were painted on watercolour paper. My lack of a studio and storage space, poverty, marginalization, and my excessive creativity has forced me to work mostly on paper. Even though such works usually only attract specialist collectors since buyers usually look for major statements on canvas or in bronze. I find paper a finer, more delicate support for painting – which comes with less baggage and expectations - though I have often used the best quality paper money can buy. The sheer variety of papers available also allows me to adjust the ground I draw and paint on and the nature of the finished work.
Drawing is the most creative, pure, and direct medium amongst all the visual arts, flowing from the artists hand and revealing its life force on the paper. It is also the cheapest medium which many artists have resorted to in periods of poverty. And because it is the cheapest medium it also allows the artist the greatest experimentation and risk taking, because a failure is of no financial consequence. Paper is not simply a screen on which an artist works – it is an active participant in the creative process. Ironically, I forced my personal tragedy upon paper and expressed most of my artistic and sexual muscle and wounded machismo on humble sheets of paper. I am a connoisseur of the finest papers and many cheap ones as well. Every kind of paper has its own qualities and I have worked on Daler Rowney cartridge paper; Daler Rowney, Canson and Fabriano pastel paper; Sennelier pastel card; Winsor & Newton acrylic paper; Arches oil paper, Fabriano oil paper, Winsor & Newton oil paper; Cotman, Langton, Bockingford, Fabriano, Arches, Clarefontaine, Saunders Waterford watercolour paper, and Moulin de Plombie watercolour paper; as well as Indian Khadi cotton rag; Nepalese vegetable paper; Canson The Wall marker paper; and Clarefontaine multi-media paper. Many of these papers when placed against the light revealed a watermark. But I also worked on thick sheets of acetate with permanent markers, my own photographs, porn magazine pages, reproductions of World War Two maps, reproductions of vintage newspaper sheets, pages from books like ones on Sade or women’s sexual fantasies, reproductions of erotic prints, CD album pages, photographs, exhibition invitation cards, commercial advertisements, psychiatric medical packaging, photocopies, wallpaper and fancy papers. But usually, I coated these commercial lower grade papers with a layer of acrylic matt varnish with UV protection to help preserve them. I have also made use of various mediums on paper (individually or in combination) like; pencil, coloured pencils, Conté, Indian ink, permanent markers, gouache, watercolour, acrylic, alkyd, oil, oil-stick or spray-paint. My favourite drawing medium for the past few decades, has been brush and Indian ink because it allows me to be totally spontaneous and my line to flow freely. However, it took me decades of drawing to achieve such freedom with brush and ink.
Since at least 1982, I have painted at night, because my mother was asleep, our house was quiet, and nothing could interrupt me. I also painted with my Walkman headphones on, under artificial light, and from second-hand media images, because I could not bear the presence of others while I painted. But at night I was constantly plagued by anxiety, paranoia, and sexual despair, and night terrors. As such my art is mostly a misanthropic, anti-social, dark, night-time vision of humanity at its worst.
As a weak and helpless child, I watched my mother go insane from a safe distance. I became totally passive and voyeuristic, and I was constantly on the alert for danger not only from my mother but other women and men. Looking on at the world from a safe distance became an obsession for me. I lived my life looking at art in books, women in porn, and the horrors of the world on the news. Because I am terrified of criticism and embarrassed by praise, chronically shy and loath most interactions with real people, about 80% of my work has been based upon photographs, of which about 75% were found in the media. Even most of my self-portraits were made from Polaroid’s, video-stills, photographs, and JPEGs, because I did not like looking at myself in the mirror, I found it tedious, and disliked the limited number of expressions I could capture looking in a mirror. But when I had my first interview with the Head of Fine Art in NCAD in January 1987, I was castigated for my use of photography. It remained a point of contestation in my head for the rest of my life, as I learned not only how many artists had used photography but also how many lied through their teeth about their use of photography! The revulsion of so many artists towards photography, was not only because photography had made the visual documentation of life in paint irrelevant, and many of them unemployable, photography had also exposed the idealism, and fantasies of art. Even if I had the money to hire models to paint or photograph, I would not do it. I do not want any involvement whatsoever with who I paint and do not do commissions. I am so introverted that I have preferred to work indoors, under artificial light, at night, from; newspaper and magazine clippings, black and white photographs of classical sculptures, movie stills, television screen grabs, glamour photographs, images lifted from pornographic magazines and videos, anatomy prints, vintage erotica, postcards, reproductions of artworks, internet JPGs, sports action shots, web pages, children’s books, family photos, personally taken photographs of myself and friends and scenes from my holidays. I use these sources as a way of reacting to and commenting on the world without participating in it.
Yet, while these various forms of photographic sources provided the starting point for my work, their real subject was my own expressive manipulation of paint, used to express my anxiety. I deliberately choose to mostly work from anonymous, artless, snap-shot photographs, and I avoid women in fashion or hair styles that are too specify to a given period, because I seek a more timeless quality. Unlike most of my contemporaries who use photographs to critique photography and express alienation - I use photographs as a pretext for my own subjective responses. Like a dark poet of reality, I remake familiar images, turning them into revelations of myself and my anguished vision. While most of the photographs I use, were taken by people who had at least an indirect relationship with the people and places they photographed, my relationship is only with the resulting image. Moreover, as an introvert, fearful of real involvement with the world, and as a voyeur who takes the most pleasure in just looking - I am happy with this lack of real involvement. However, I maybe nothing but a voyeur, but I turn the viewers of my art into voyeurs twice over.
Since the invention of European prints in the late fifteenth century, Western artists have used woodcuts, engravings, and etchings of masterworks - as aids in their depiction of landscapes, architectural details, and group compositions. In Western oil painting - minor artists imitated the compositions and poses that the old masters had invented – often with little alteration. Since the seventeenth century, artists have used camera obscura devices to help them deal with perspective and since the late nineteenth century, artists like Manet and Degas have used photographs in their paintings. In fact, the pictorial grammar of cropped shots which painters like Degas exploited where influenced by early photography. The conservative art critic Robert Hughes was no fan of artists using photography and mass media as inspiration for their work but even he had to concede that: “There is scarcely an important artist of the past hundred years around whom a book could not be spun, and a show constructed, with the title “Fred X and Photography””. (Robert Hughes, Horrible!, The Guardian, August, 2008.)
At one time or another; Gustave Courbet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Walter Sickert, Henri Rousseau, Maurice Utrillo, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, George Bellows, Francis Picabia, Bernard Buffet, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Eric Stanton, Robert Crumb, Leon Golub, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, R B Kitaj, Richard Hamilton, Betty Tomkins, Malcolm Morley, Henry Darger, Richard Artschwager, Sigmar Polke, Anslem Kiefer, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Martin Kippenberger, Raymond Pettibon, Luc Tuymans, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Glen Brown, John Currin, Zhang Xiaogang, Richard Prince, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Peter Doig, and Adrien Ghenie (to name just a few important painters) have created paintings and artworks based on mass media images. So, it is not unusual for me to have done so too. To that list one can add; Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Eduard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Wilhelm Leibl, Franz von Lenbach, Franz von Stuck, Fernand Khnopff, Max Libermann, Max von Slevogt, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Moreau, James Ensor, Pierre Bonnard, Thomas Eakins, George Hendrik Breitner, Maurice Denis, Eduard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Balthus, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Robert Crumb, Eric Stanton, Alex Katz, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Vija Celmins, Gerhard Richter, Anslem Kiefer, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Luc Tuymans, Jeff Koons and Jenny Saville who used photographs they took of models in order to aid their paintings. All these artists proved that it is the interpretation of such images - that makes them different from mere student copying. Moreover, one hundred different artists could take the same photograph and make one hundred totally different paintings from it! And frankly, I could take the same photo and make many different versions of it over the course of my life!
There are also many artists who have appropriated soft or hardcore pornographic imagery as source material for their artworks including Francis Picabia, Salvador Dalí, Tom Wesselmann, Mel Ramos, Allen Jones, Betty Tomkins, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, R B Kitaj, David Salle, Marlene Dumas, Lisa Yuskavage, Cecile Brown, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe, and John Currin.
In the early days of photography many Salon painters eagerly adopted photography to aid in their elaborate paintings. However, the disjunction between their historical style with the matter-of-fact nature of photography often proved glaring. The advent of silent movies applied the coup de grâce to naturalistic painting, and artists realised that their future depended upon doing what photography and cinema could not do. For van Gogh photography could not show the hand of God in nature, for Munch photography could not show the anguish of human desire, for Picasso photography could not depict the space we inhabit, for Kandinsky photography could not show the spiritual patterns in existence, for Dali photography could not show the nature of our dreams and nightmares, and for Pollock photography could not embody the anguish of existence. By the mid twentieth century artists who relied upon photographs for imagery were often castigated as little better than crass and stupid Sunday painters. So, artists have proved highly deceptive about their use of photography. Fearful that their art’s value and originality would be called into question, they have often destroyed their source material after use and made no mention of it in interviews. Others made a habit of admitting their use of photography, however coyly pretending they used many photos as source material and destroying those specific photos they depended upon. Personally, I destroy most of my photographic sources at the completion of a work – a ceremony signalling I can do no more. However, I make no secret of my use of photographic material.
As Baudelaire has pointed out, photography can poison vision. It records reality, but lacks an imaginative component, and as Gary Indiana has commented “the camera cannot lie, but it also cannot tell the truth.” (Gary Indiana, “Report from Paris,” Art in America, May 1984, P. 36.) For me, photography could not depict the monstrous and suicidal self-hatred I had, or the toxic mixture of lust and fear that liberated women or pornography inspired in me. When painting from life I do not feel any need to do anything but record what is in front of me. However, when working from photographs I feel compelled to ramp up the intensity of line, colour, and texture to make it more a work of my own. I do not copy photographs - I interpret them! The shock of my work is that I take ‘objective’ mechanical and electronic images – often of the most extreme kind - and personalized them. I use them as props, which I manipulated visually to express my individual moods and reactions to such imagery. This was a pre-condition I set on all my ‘copies’ from photographs from 1987 onwards. Perversely, I have always painted from photographs like I was painting from life. I do not slavishly stick to the photographic image as Photorealists do (my alkyd painting Country Road, 1988, based on a photograph my father had taken, was one of the few notable examples of dispassionate copying in my oeuvre.) And even when I have tried to be my most academic, disciplined and ‘objective’ – my pathological anxiety has seeped into the facture of the painting.
Photographs allow me greater freedom in how I chose to treat a subject without the pressure to flatter a sitter or create a good likeness in their view. In most cases, I correct or deconstruct the image to create something entirely different. I typically choose emotive subjects - photographed in snapshot, off-hand, banal, mediocre ways and give them a much bolder and aggressive stylization. The pose of the model and the composition is all I retain. I completely transform the colouring, crop the image, and infect it with my own linear and expressionist treatment.
Moreover, I do not use found photographs out of an inability to create images of my own. I make collages, which create different kinds of visual connections. I paint abstracts based on nothing but my own sketches. I create surreal images from my imagination. I work from my memory. I work from my dreams and nightmares. Finally, since 1989, I have periodically made many studies from life in all kinds of mediums. However, despite my many attempts to draw or paint from life, I have found my exposure to the world and other people, has overwhelmed me with performance anxiety, agoraphobia, and social phobia. Which has meant I have frequently only produced very superficial sketch like work and retreated quickly back into my solitude.
Throughout my horrific childhood, my mother would say “children are resilient”. But I wasn’t. I may have thought as a child that I had avoided becoming contaminated by my mother’s madness by isolating myself from her - and escaping into a fantasy world of art and erotica. But I was wrong. In retrospect, I can see signs that I was suffering from a borderline personality disorder as young as eleven or twelve - even though I was not to be diagnosed with it until late 1991 at the age of twenty. But throughout my early visits with GPs in 1991, numerous admittances to the casualty department in Beaumont Hospital on the northside of Dublin from 1991-1993 after my suicide attempts, my three incarcerations in St. Ita’s Mental Hospital in Portrane in North County Dublin, from late 1991-1993, as well as my sessions with three different psychotherapists from 1987-2003 - I was never told what my psychiatric diagnosis was! It was only in around 1998 that through the Freedom of Information Act I got access to my diagnosis! In my psychiatric files of 1991-1995, I was diagnosed as; dangerously impulsive, with a tendency towards intellectualization, depressed, pre-psychotic, passive-aggressive and highly dependent. However, repeatedly I was described as suffering from a borderline personality disorder, in other words I was irritable, impulsive, had difficulty forming relationships and getting on with people or enjoying social situations. There are nine key traits of a borderline personality disorder. You only need five of them to be diagnosed with the condition and I have had all nine! To be honest, because I spent my childhood dealing with my mother’s paranoid-schizophrenia and my own psychiatric incarcerations and numerous friendships with severely mentally ill people - I was rather blasé about my diagnosis. It was only in late middle age, that I realised how serious and stigmatised borderline personality disorder was. It is in fact one of the most pilloried mental illnesses and many therapists will not work with patients like me. BDP is often thought of as the female variate of anti-social personality disorder although many men also suffer from it. Around 40% of BPD patients have suffered childhood abuse but it is also thought that there are strong genetic predispositions that can also result in or exacerbate the illness. Sufferers of BPD are often thought to be not just insane but also manipulative and evil. Moreover, while sufferers of BPD like me, can often analyse and understand their illness - but they are not capable of doing anything about it or changing their behaviour.
Because of my borderline personality disorder, I do not have a strong sense of self and I have a very complex and conflicted character. I have often felt that if people really knew me – they would not like me – so I am often like a chameleon changing my persona to please people, so they won’t abandon me. I have often changed my name, fashion, hair style or hair colour, sexual orientation, and artistic style. I am extremely emotionally unstable. I can go from angry to sad to cheerful in the same hour. I have deep fears (real or imagined) of being abandoned. I have intense relationships which start passionately and swing from intense love to anger and fears of abandonment. All my relationships have a rollercoaster feel. I often do not know who I am or what my identity is. So, I have spent my life fighting a desperate inner battle to find out who I am. And sometimes I can even pop into multiple identities. One day I could have a young boy persona, then the next a mad artist persona, then a serious intellectual persona and latter even a sexy man persona. So, my identity is really disrupted. I act impulsivity without thinking about it and I have little control of my emotions. I always act in line with my emotions, and I cannot inhibit them. Which is why I have constantly got into arguments with people, and I have had to largely teach myself everything I know about art and writing - because I could not submit myself to the discipline of art college or academia. I have often binge painted, used pornography, drug taken, shopped, and in my early twenties I even binged on sex with prostitutes. A lot of the time it has been the only way I have known to sooth the acute pain and emptiness I feel. I often have had recurrent suicidal thoughts and in my early twenties I repeatedly tried to kill myself - but I always called for help in the end, because although I had wanted to kill myself in the immediate moment, after a short period of time the feeling had evaporated, and I had left terrified of dying. I have also tried to kill myself after fights with people I love, because I have felt terrified that they did not love me - and they would abandon me. People often think self-harm episodes by people with BPD are attention seeking and manipulative - but often they are really an expression of deep emotional distress. So, my greatest struggle in life has been with myself and I feel like my life is a constant emotional tidal wave that makes me overreact to everything. I feel chronically empty inside and my heart feels like an empty drum. So, I want to fill it up that sense of emptiness – by manically creating art, buying art materials and books, taking drugs, and using porn. But it is like pouring water in a drum with a gaping hole in the bottom - so everything I put in gushes out the end just as fast - and I still feel empty inside no matter what I do. All of this is a very panic inducing feeling for me, and I often have inappropriate and intense panic attacks or explosions of anger. What might seem like a very small thing to other people –will make me blow up. And it happens so quickly that it can terrify other people. So, family and friends have often felt like they are living on eggshells around me and life with me is like some weird alternative universe where they never know what the right thing to say or do is. When extremely distressed, I have had frankly paranoid symptoms and I have really thought that there was a conspiracy against me and my art - and that people might harm me. At these times, I was on the edge of psychosis, and I had broken off from reality. But usually, these episodes only lasted a few hours or days. When women have flirted with me, because of my abuse at the hands of my mother, I have even experienced dissociation where I have blanked out, panicked, attempted to flee - and if I could not flee - I have become verbally aggressive. One of the most difficult things about my BPD was that I was never fully sane or insane. Instead, I could swing from sober sanity to psychotic delusion in the space of a single day. My borderline personality disorder not only spun my emotions uncontrollably from elation to despair in the space of an hour or even minutes - it also consumed my talent. Crippled throughout my life by my borderline personality disorder – I wasted my artistic ability and social opportunities. Even my girlfriends, family members and friends who have known me for years have said that they do not understand me. Because of my borderline personality disorder, I have been crippled by toxic shame and I have constantly felt evil, broken, misunderstood and unlovable. So, I have often isolated myself from the world to avoid confrontations with other people. Which is also one of the reasons why I have preferred to turn to the safe distanced voyeurism of pornography - to avoid the terror of relationships with real women and trauma of real sex. So, I am more emotionally and psychiatrically disturbed than virtually any normal artist, never mind most Old or Modern Masters. In fact, I am even more disturbed than my heroes like van Gogh, Schiele, Basquiat, or Schnabel and even many Outsider artists notorious for their eccentricity and psychiatric illness.
One of the features of people with BPD is their obsession with and love for inanimate transitional objects like paintings. And for most of my childhood, teenage years, and early twenties, I had a more intense and real relationship with paintings than other human beings. This even went so far as to being naïve and ignorant of the real-life failings of their makers and an idolization of art above human life. I would have happily laid down my life to protect the National Gallery of Ireland or The Hugh Lane Gallery but not blinked an eye if the whole of Dublin’s population had been annihilated. That is why, when I finally matured, became more humane and worldly-wise I became such a critic of the sham of art.
Because of my borderline personality disorder, my vision of myself as an artist is extremely unstable and I can wildly swing from thinking I am the greatest artist the world has ever seen, to thinking I am the most sick, delusional, and talentless man to ever call himself an artist in the space a few minutes. And often I just feel a terrible sense of emptiness and worthlessness. I have continuously mortified and trashed myself in my art and but just as often gloried in my talent. My BPD provokes me to have a very extreme and dystopia vision of the world - which is made manifest in my traumatic and cognitively dissonant artworks. My art is notable for both its erotic and confessional mania. Due to my borderline personality disorder, I aesthetically swing wildly from a love of the expressive and instinctive to the traditional and academic. Because of my BPD my work is characterised by breaks in style and subject matter and shifts from figuration to abstraction - that do not follow the usual linear chronology of conventional oeuvres. My artworks swing wildly between extremely repressed and impersonal, to aggressive, suicidal, and confessional. In the space of a few weeks, I have gone from painting realistically to expressionistically to abstractly and even conceptually. Due to my disassociation from my thoughts, feelings, memories, and identity, because of my childhood abuse, which I suffered through in silence, and which resulted in my borderline personality disorder, I often do not know what I am feeling as I make my artworks, and often I have no idea what their artistic or emotional meaning is after I have made them! Because my emotions and thoughts are so erratic and fleeting, I prefer to work on small-scale works on paper rather than on large laborious canvases. And it is in my works on paper - that my true personality is revealed the most. While painting any subject, but in particular, my self-portraits, female portraits and nudes and pornographic scenes, my vision, emotional attitude and perception of the subject can swing from love to hate to indifference and then back to love and hate again in the space of a few hours. I paint in tidal waves of creativity followed by equally intense periods of creative drought and despair. I have changed style constantly and frequently had stylistic identity crises. At my most artistically uninspired, I have often adopted the style of artists who I hero worshipped like; Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel and descended into visual plagiarism and pastiche. My artistic vision has gone from fanatically grandiose to self-loathing and defeatist and back again to fanatically grandiose depending on my mood. I have painted and drawn the most conventional and safe subjects but also the most extreme subjects from pornography and childbirth to violent boxing and UFC fights. I have continuously made confessional or sexual artworks fearlessly, but later felt mortified by them. And I have constantly confessed my sins and expressed my toxic shame and guilt in my art. Since I feared I would be rejected anyway by the art world, I have often painted porn to further alienate people, and confirm my rejection, or I have even made artworks in which I explicitly told the art world I fucking hated it! I have painted in joyful and ecstatic frenzies, but also in bitter shameful despair. At the age of twenty, I changed my name to Cypher to signify my loss of self and at my most depressed, self-loathing and hopeless my work was often noticeable for its repressed and impersonal style. But I also have painted myself attempting self-mutilation to try to unload my pain into paint. I have often painted realistic images - only to vandalise them mid-way through, because I despaired at my lack of talent and skill. I have frequently worked my artworks all over signifying my pre-psychotic fear of a horror vacui. I have frequently made artworks that expressed an extremely black and white vision of the world in which I either loved or hated women or I was either cock happy or impotent or where people were either beautiful or ugly and where my art was either priceless or worthlessness. Or I have regressed into conventional realist artworks when I have lost my self-belief and have been desperate to be accepted by art lovers. In my extreme periods of emotional distress my work has looked paranoid, or I have painted myself as a child as I did in works from 2009. At my most paranoid and fearful I have made most of my abstract artworks - hoping that I could sublimate and disguise the issues behind my trauma. I have also been angered at my lack of artistic recognition and been convinced that there was a conspiracy against my art. Thus, for viewers, my artworks have often been painfully emotional, distressing and frightening to contemplate. My art has looked like it has come from some terrifying parallel universe, and it was extremely difficult for viewers to empathise with me or understand what I was trying to say with my art. So, most art lovers have written me off as a deranged maniac making filthy images, whose compulsive, purging, therapy artwork was worthless rubbish. As for myself, I have swung between being incredibly proud of my oeuvre and being ashamed and bitterly disappointed by it. Because of my BPD, I have intensely identified with all kinds of artistic, philosophical, and sexual ideas - but I have also just as passionately later refuted them. I have also gone from adoring art to hating it. This makes my day-to-day life like living on a roller-coaster! And even girlfriends, family members or friends who have known me for years have said that they do not understand me or my art. So, sadly, I never had what it takes to become a great successful artist. I had no consistent style. I was antagonistic not only towards society - but also the art world. And I lacked the strength, courage, cunning and sheer bloody mindedness needed to promote my career. But most importantly, I could not lie in either my art or my life!
From the first time I began looking at paintings in my parents’ art books at about the age of six as well as in the National Gallery of Ireland, I was struck dumb with wonder at the magic of oil painting to create such believable visual worlds. By the age of ten I was obsessed with drawing and painting, and my passion for them has never left me. Later, I was overjoyed by the beauty of Impressionism, and the dance of coloured brushstrokes on their canvases. Not much later, I loved to watch Clement Greenberg explain the originality, and formal beauty of Jackson Pollock in Modern Art and Modernism from the open University on BBC 2. So, from the start, rather than using an academic illusionist approach to drawing and painting which I considered redundant, I was influenced on a technical level by a Modernist approach to painting which acknowledged that the paper or canvas was a flat surface and applied my paint in brushstrokes which highlighted their own artificial and independent nature. Meanwhile, learning to draw and paint, I turned to practical books for amateurs on the materials and techniques of drawing and painting. Later, took classes in watercolour and oils with adult amateurs. I do not know how much real talent I ever had a child, although my teachers said I was exceptional. But I always found drawing and painting extremely difficult and anxiety producing. But I would then feel overjoyed if I achieved something I did not know I was capable of. However, I constantly felt totally inadequate. My struggles to draw and paint realistically taught me heartfelt respect for the skills of the Old Masters.
On the other hand, my study of art history and in particular Modernism, taught me how difficult it is to invent a new style or way of seeing the world. Then art criticism taught me how skill alone can become facile, superficial, and vacuous, and how style can become a straitjacket leading to sterility and self-parody. Looking at Expressionism in my mid-teens I found that it spoke to me personally because I too could not separate how I felt, from how I saw the world. When I discovered Egon Schiele, I was overwhelmed by his superb draughtsmanship, expressive intensity, originality, and daring exploration of pathological and sexual issue and he became my gold standard for an expressive artist. A little later I discovered the early work of Picasso and I realised that his later iconoclastic innovations only came after he had proved himself to be a prodigious talent, and an exceptional academic training. It was Picasso who taught me that an artist could prove the validity, seriousness, and depth of their oeuvre, simply through the tireless process of drawing and painting, and relentless developing of ideas and imagery. Picasso also taught me that being influenced by other artist was necessary for developing my own style, and like Picasso I happily cannibalised other artists, but I always tried to infect their style with my own subjectivity and pathology. As such Picasso was the ultimate practical rebuke to theorical hot air. So, I began to combine, a respect for traditional skills, with emotional issues, sexual anxiety, and the reactive painting of pornography. The Neo-Expressionists showed me that Expressionism could be reinvented and used to reframe mass media sources through a subjective vision. The art critic Robert Hughes taught me that the greatest figurative painters of Modernism had been academically trained in drawing and painting or had trained themselves, and that newness, or stylistic novelty was not a virtue. Later, I learned from Vincent van Gogh and Eugène Delacroix that an artist could also be a writer and vital recorder of their own working methods, artistic concerns, and oeuvre. So, despite my isolation and the aggressive neglect, of the art world, I became my own biographer, critic, historian, and analyst. Which only taught me how difficult they too were.
Perhaps because of my borderline personality disorder, I have never been able to full decide if I lean more towards tradition or innovation, skills, or ideas, and I have never been able to paint in a singular style. Every time I begin a painting, I only have a rough idea of how it will turn out, and in fact as things happen while I paint, I often delight in discovering where they will lead. So, I have painted in dozens of styles, and dozens of mediums because it is the only way painting remans interesting for me. Moreover, my work combines a paradoxical respect for craft and skill with pathological, transgressive, and pornographic content. And I like to use skills I have honed over years to produce debased imagery. So, in an age when critics deplored artists who could not draw or paint, I was praised for the quality of my drawing and painting - but condemned for what I drew and painted.
I have always had an ambivalent relationship to traditional painting and drawing skills and styles. On the one hand I have done my best to develop my craft, and skills on the other hand I have always believed that being able to fully express something only matters if you have something authentic, original, and psychologically important to say. So, while I have periodically produced quite academic work, I have only done so to sharpen my skills. Yet, at the same time, I have also fanatically believed that it is pointless to express something if you do not have the talent and skills to make it really telling.
I am always looking for the precious moment of painting when something comes to me that I had not expected. I often go for long periods without painting or drawing. I let my mind wander and develop in a dreamy state of idleness. I do my homework before painting. Stocking up and preparing my materials, reading art theory and criticism, looking at reproductions in art books, visiting museums and acquiring source material. I think about materials, subjects, scale and mediums. Then suddenly, when feel inspired, I start painting instinctively and the ideas gush forth with seeming spontaneity and irresistible drive. When I do paint, I paint frenetically with the passion of a man inspired. Nothing is more precious to me than the time I spend painting. It is only in painting that I feel like a king of the world and only while in the actual act. The following day though, I am usually plunged back into self-doubts. Writing on the other hand I find is debilitating and self-lacerating process without end. In fact, I sometimes find reading and writing about art is paralytic to actual painting or the making of anything. So, it was only in my ‘uncreative’ phases that I wrote.
The spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of my self-portraits and pornographic artworks was the result of the fact that I usually painted during periods of personal crisis, though due to my borderline personality disorder these periods of mental anguish could be very frequent. As a nihilist, I rarely saw the point of making art. It was only when I was tremendously compelled, or traumatised, and in need of catharsis that I made art. So, even my artworks that might have signalled a mood of optimism, frequently only signified my intense need for the therapeutic release of my feelings of rage and shame.
If you want consistency in an artist, you will never find it in my work. Most artists only ever do one thing. My art is not dependent upon a single style or manner. It has many strands. Taking my art as a totality, does not mean that it everything is of equal value. There are major works but there are also many minor works of lesser value. However, the cumulative effect gets more powerful the more I produce and the more I complicate things. My paintings are an example of unfettered creativity made selfishly without the restraints of Art Colleges, galleries, curators, or critics. My work is an art of absolute freedom. I have a voracious desire to analyse and reanalyse, cast and recast the world in one style and medium after another. This is not art as a profession - it is art as a way of life. Consequently, I have been criticized for; the varying degrees of conviction in my paintings and my stylistic promiscuity, it has even been suggested that I am too playful, and not serious enough about my development of a mature signature style - nothing could be further from the truth. I am deathly serious about my art. The core of my art can roughly be divided into seven major periods:
1. 1987-1990 - My Black Paintings Period. Although, I had painted before I could ever remember, it was only in 1987, that I left school to become an artist. After being soundly rejected for application to NCAD (my first of four times) I destroyed all my amateur work from 1980-1986. That I destroyed all my precious early work, was a symptom of how little I felt encouraged, supported, or respected. Trying to make myself seem like a prodigy, in January 1987, I started backdating my artworks by a few months. Thinking I was destined to be one of the greatest artists who had ever lived, I began painting influenced by Rembrandt, Ingres, Degas, Schiele, and Picasso. I retreated into my bedroom, to run-away from my deranged mother, the terrifying presence of girls and an adult world I could not deal with. I dropped out of life and escaped into an imaginary world of artistic glory, masturbation, and sexual fantasy. All my paintings and drawings from 1987-1995 were marked by an acute alexithymia, or inability to express my emotions or describe them, and an inability to judge the emotions of others or feel empathy for others. In the spring of 1988, my dreams of artistic glory received a crushing blow, when I discovered the early child prodigy artworks of Picasso and realised, I would never beat him. So, I began to back date my work by up to a year and half, to make myself look more precocious. When I finally revealed this deadly secret to my therapist in January 1993, I tried to kill myself. But when I survived, I stopped back dating my work. The blackness of my paintings at the time, were an expression of my depression and self-hate, which also warped and deformed my technical ability and limited my artistic vision. The surfaces of my Black Paintings were so thickly lacquered with paint, that they formed an impervious air-tight surface that mirrored my repressed, reclusive, and anti-social existence. In addition, there were my classical drawings, which displayed a strong linear style, with bold outlines and sharp contrasts of tone. These mute and repressed drawings also mirrored my own selectively mute and shut-in nature at the time and there was barely any emotional spillage in these frozen, almost robotic drawings. During 1990, I struggled to break free of my rigid linear drawing, heavy hand, and dark pallet. I tried to make my paintings more expressive, colourful and transfuse my roiling emotions into pigment. As a result, many of my works of 1990 dismally failed - though I did create a few works that I could build upon in the following year. Tormented Lovers of late 1990, was perhaps my most import early erotic artwork. I took a kitsch, hippie, illustration of a couple embracing in a sex manual, and turned it into a demonic expression of my fear of women, fear of intimacy, and performance anxiety. Even at this early stage, my work was notable for its confessional and erotic mania and gynophobia. The subject matter of my work from 1987-1990, included nude self-portraits and nude self-portraits masturbating, as well as tormented erotic scenes, female portraits, female nudes and my first drawings based on pornographic source material.
2. 1991-1995 – My Panic Art Period. When, I was intensely lonely, gynophobic, suicidal, tortured by my sexual inadequacy, and suffered from an agonising borderline personality disorder – compounded by years of living self-isolated in my bedroom. I painted for years in solitude, mapping my inner existential inferno with a trail of agonised paintings and projected my sexual terror of women onto huge pornographic canvases. In many ways, my early work was a form of proto-Black Pill-Incel art. My Panic paintings were explosive expressionist paintings made up of angular shapes, simplified drawing, bold juxtapositions of contrasting colours (red and green or orange and blue) frenzied brushstrokes and jammed with text and diagrams. I was influenced by Richard Gerstl, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel amongst many others. In April 1991, I began signing my work 'Cypher' as a sign of my alienation, and to break free of my domineering mother, by creating an alter-ego that defied her and all her values. Also, by naming myself ‘Cypher’ I announced to all those with eyes to see - that I knew I was an artist of no importance and a man of no social prestige or influence, living in a Godless universe without meaning. I would only revert to my real name in February 2009 after my mother's death. When I had been in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design in 1990, a girl in my class had made a large phallus with a woman riding ecstatically on top of it. Not only did her sculpture shock me because it was such an uncritical anti-Feminist celebration of cock, it also made me feel inadequate, and it represented a joyful image of sex I could not relate to. So, in 1992, I made numerous images of phalluses being cut with razor blades or penetrated by pins or nails. And all my self-portraits and porn images at the time expressed my self-loathing sexual frustration. From June 1990 to September 1993, was my most authentic ‘Outsider’ period when I created my art in insane solitude for my own personal reasons and without any audience or critics. From 1991-1995, was also the period during which I created virtually all my large-scale works - because I spent most of my modest inheritance from my father’s death on the best quality artist materials and large French linen canvases. My work included suicidal nude self-portraits, nude self-portraits masturbating and nude self-portraits mutilating myself, as well as pornographic scenes, anguished female nudes, my first abstracts and a growing number of autobiographical text-based works. Meanwhile, tortured by my virginity and unable to court or seduce a girl, I finally lost my virginity aged twenty-one in May 1992 to a prostitute in Amsterdam. From May 1992-January 1995, I visited Amsterdam four times, and had sex with thirty-nine different women and some of them half a dozen times. Between the autumn of 1993 and the winter of 1994, I had a couple of male lovers but only because I was so lonely and terrified of women. But I remained sexually attracted only to women. Then between the late spring on 1994, and the late autumn of 1995, I had a number of one-night stands with alternative girls.
3. 1996-2000 – My Post-Adolescent Period. During which, I broke free from my mother and lived in my late twenties, the teenage years I had sacrificed for my art. I had my first girlfriend and saviour Helen Black with whom I enjoyed a full sex life and a growing circle of friends. I spent more time than ever in the past, socialising, drinking, drug taking, fucking, going to gigs, and having debauched nights in clubs and house parties. Sick of risking my life for my art (which everyone hated) I made a conscious decision to try to be happy regardless of how it affected my art. Besides, my anguished and lonely, proto-Black Pill-Incel art made no sense once I had a freed myself from my mother and had a girlfriend who loved me and sexually satisfied me. So, all of this, and my growing maturity, challenged my self-created solipsistic adolescent universe and fanatical artistic focus. My work from 1996-2004, became fatally self-conscious, deadpan, and performative. Aware for the first time of people’s reactions to my art, it turned from a confession into a coded performance. It was also a period when lack of money for art materials, drove me to spend more time writing than painting - and arguably my writing, diminished my creativity and ability to emote on canvas. Thus, my artworks began to be more about the expression of ideas rather than raw emotion. There was also a lowering of ambition, imaginative levels, and seriousness in my work from 1996-2000. Struggling to make sense of my new life and creating under the influence of hashish, ecstasy, and Outsider Art, I made even more insane and transgressive looking works to overcompensate for my lack of feeling or belief. My work at the time was jammed with text, diagrams, and abstract smears of pure colour straight from the tube, often on ready-made supports such as pornographic magazine pages, photographs, and reproductions of war maps. I even ransacked the petit-bourgeois paintings and furniture, that had graced Tara my mother and father’s house in Howth and had been the site of my worst abuse and trauma at the hands of my deranged mother, after my father’s death. My subjects included pornographic cartoons and paintings, insane drug induced collages, symbolic abstracts, acetate based nude self-portraits and orgy scenes. However, by 1998 at the age of twenty-seven, my fanatical belief in my art had been lost because of the evaporation of my adolescent vision, my lack of success as an artist and my bitter study of art criticism and pessimistic philosophy. Thus, my artworks of 1998 declared my hatred of art. My work lost its explosive solipsistic intensity of expression and became more impersonal, straight-faced, distanced, ironic, cynical, and Post-Modern as my work became more and more influenced by Julian Schnabel.
4. 2001-2004 – My Identity Crisis Period. Which was brought on by my two exhibitions in the Oisín Gallery in Dublin in 2000 and 2002, during which I was castigated from nearly all sides. In short, critics admired my talent - but thought I was a sick misogynist. I also had to endure constant criticism from my dealers and pressure to make PG-rated, commercial, conservative illustrative work. Which led me to have the most desperate identity crisis of my career. As an artist I lost self-belief, inspiration, courage, and direction, and I would spend the next five years trying to re-build myself as an artist. My subjects included figurative and text paintings damning the Irish art world, male and female academic studies, self-portrait busts, landscapes, soft-core female nudes and pornographic drawings and paintings - all painted under the delirious influence of hashish. These works were often of student quality - due to my intensive rebuilding of my technique. In mid-2004, my first girlfriend Helen ended our relationship - leaving me distraught and forced to rebuild my life again. At the end, Helen observed that the work I had done while we were together from late 1996 to mid-2004, was nothing compared to the work I had done when isolated, tortured by sexual inadequacy and suicidal. And I knew she was right. Meanwhile, I gradually lost touch with most of my old friends.
5. 2005-Mid-2007 - The Carol Stevens Period. Saw the start of my re-birth as an artist through the influence of my beloved second girlfriend and greatest muse Carol Stevens. Realising, that as an artist I had gained little from friendships, contact with an art gallery, socialising, or debauchery, I vowed to live alone with Carol and concentrate fully on my art, the way I had in my early twenties. Apart from online fans, most of whom never seemed real to me, Carol became virtually my only artistic audience, and I trusted her opinion, more than anyone I had ever known. We also spent a lot of our time going to art exhibitions and I wrote an art blog about our trips – which helped to codify my ideas about art. Carol also encouraged me to explore less hardcore and more varied imagery, so over twice as much of my work from 2005-2016 were non-pornographic even conventional subjects as my work from 1987-2004.
6. Late 2007-2018 – My Purple Period. It was notable for my frequent use of purples, violets, mauves, and pinks. I was intoxicated by the magical power, intensity, and sincerity of the colour purple. My extraordinary use of purple was a symbolic manifestation of my paranoid psychosis, dreadful pride and self-sufficiency, borderline personality disorder and persecution complex. It was also a totemistic attempt to find obsessive-compulsive safety from complete mental breakdown - in a consistent pallet of purple. My Purple Period was full of threatening and doom-laden images - made even more so by my purple pallet. I did not always use purple in my paintings of this period, but it was the dominant colour and reoccurred again and again at my lowest ebbs. Between late-2007 and mid-2017, my art possessed greater maturity, painterly-application and refinement of style. And I painted with more intensity, consistency, and thoughtfulness than I ever had - even in my explosive Panic Art Period of 1991-1993. In terms of pure craft and technical mastery - I reached the height of my powers in my forties. I also began to paint far more from within myself and transform my artistic influences into artworks that could only have been made by me. Meanwhile, between late-2007 and mid-2013, Carol studied Fine Art in NCAD first to gain a Degree and then a Masters. Not only did her youthful exploration of creativity re-light my fire as an artist and give me a cherished companion whom I could talk to intensively about art and show my work to, she also gave me access to the NCAD library where I devoured books on Neo-Expressionism and Expressionism. At the start of 2009, my mother died, and I suffered the worst nervous breakdown of my life. I only survived because of the love and support of Carol. As well as experiencing extreme grief - I also found all the memories and feelings I had suppressed about my childhood overwhelm me. This was compounded by my cannabis induced psychosis. So, my work from 2009-2016 was consumed by feelings of grief, guilt, shame, anger, and despair. The 7th February 2009 also saw me return to signing my paintings ‘David Murphy’. For the next few years, I frequently painted my mother from my memory, imagination, and old family photos – as though I did not want to let her go. Late in 2009, I quit illicit drugs and drink - but continued to be addicted to codeine, caffeine, and tobacco. My subjects included guilt ridden female nudes, paintings of my mother’s funeral, landscapes and town scenes from my mother’s old Polaroid's, paintings of myself from my memory or imagination, insane collages, and frenzied abstractions. Yet, despite painting far more acceptable subject matter – my art was filled with grief, trauma and nihilism and was no more appealing than my earlier pornographic art. Then in late 2011, after trying for years to suppress my interest in sexual themes in my art and only becoming even more conflicted, distressed and self-loathing - I returned to painting erotic scenes, paintings of webcam women, expressive and unrepentant pornographic paintings. My return to pornographic imagery was also a nihilistic recognition that I was doomed to never be accepted by the art world – but I vowed to paint with the freedom of the damned. When I returned to painting erotica and then porn in the mid-summer of 2012, I avoided the transgressive extremes and perversions of my early pornographic paintings - because that no longer interested me. My late porn paintings, were more ellagic and tragically melancholy, and far more a celebration of female beauty and sexiness.
7. 2019-2021 – My Castration Complex Period. Between 2019-2021, I studied and wrote about Picasso and in particular his brothel painting Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. At the time, I suffered from porn induced erectile disfunction, compounded by my depression, toxic shame, performance anxiety, use of anti-depressants, chain smoking, and unhealthy lifestyle. I had been familiar with Sigmund Freud’s castration complex theory since a teenager - but I had never believed it – perhaps because I could not admit it to myself. So, for the first time, I understood that Les Demoiselle d’Avignon was all about Picasso’s fear of insatiable women and his own castration! For the next year, I studied texts about many men’s fear of women, shameful impotence, and terror of castration. I suddenly realised that the misogyny and sexism of men, which I had never understood, was based not on hate - but fear and inadequacy! In my own artworks, I cut up many images I had painstakingly created - as a symbol of my impotence, self-loathing, nihilism, and contempt for Fine Art. In the autumn of 2020, I became obsessed and deeply traumatised by ‘cuckold’ porn. I had seen a lot of porn in my life, but this struck me as the most psychologically fucked up thing I had ever seen. Probably because for once it was the masochistic husband being humiliated, heartbroken and psychologically destroyed and not the woman. In the small oil paintings I made after this, I depicted shrivelled, impotent penises, and portraits of myself as an abused child. A couple of months later, I made a series of Cuck Fear cartoon drawings which helped me to therapeutically work through my issues. The following May, I made my ‘The Female Gaze’ drawings and paintings which depicted entranced women gazing at men masturbating with huge cocks on social media. The Female Gaze artworks were an extension of my Incel inspired Chad and Nigel cartoons of late 2018, and my Cuck Fear cartoons of late 2020. Because they depicted alpha males with huge cocks hypnotising horny women with their massive erections. They also went right back to my first artworks of women leering at male strippers from the spring of 1991 summer of 1993. They were a direct attack on the late 1970s Feminist idea of the ‘male gaze’, which transferred the blame from women who acted up sexually, to men who look at them, denied the reality of female voyeurism, and was a gross simplification of male/female desire which I had dissected in my writing. The Female Gaze artworks also played in again, to my fears of sexual inadequacy as a man, and fear of sexually voracious women. In mid-2021, I began a series of self-portraits of myself as teenager and young man, expressing my self-loathing at the time and describing my first times with prostitutes in Amsterdam. These artworks were technically easy for me to make, but they were psychologically traumatic, because I had to relive some of the saddest moments in my life. By the end of 2021, my impotence had passed, and I realised it had been a psychological response to the mental anguish I had felt under the COVID-19 lockdown. But I also realised that my multiple breakdowns that year, were merely the symptom of a greater middle-life crisis.
8. 2022-24 - The Consolidation of Style Period. As I entered my fifties, I was confronted by all my failures - which were too late to rectify. I also began to suffer from physical frailty, and a weak heart for the first time in my life, on top of a morbid depression, and despair over a life I had wasted. In my art, I no longer explored new styles, instead I sought to take all I had learned from forty years of painting - to consolidate and sum up my artistic vision. I explored a wider range of colours; a richer, more pastose, painterly approach; and more assured expressive drawing style. I abandoned most attempts at abstract painting, though I continued to use text and collage in my work. My subjects became monomaniacally focused upon pornographic imagery, apart from some occasional self-portraits.