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SEE MORE WORK & CHECK SHOW DATES GET IN TOUCH | A California native, Michael Blackwood was born to newly immigrated British parents in 1980. He attended Brooks college Long Beach, earning an AA in design before gaining his certificate of illustration from LCAD in Laguna. His work has been exhibited in many southern California venues such as North Hollywood and Oceanside as well as England outside of London. Currently Michael paints, designs, sculpts, and writes at his home in Southern Ca.
Artist Statement
Does a painting have innate meaning? Does anything? Or do we paint our own beliefs and presuppositions into it? A painting is meaningful or meaningless depending on your perspective. At first glance, my work might seem abstruse but please be aware that I provide only the image. You provide the context. As you do with all works of art. My work is an attempt to bring attention to that fact. If you are to view it with an open mind, you must know that I was born with no visceral reaction to symbolism. As, of course, we all were. For whatever reason, I did not develop one. When did you? Do you remember? Think of the last time you were flipped off in traffic. Or saw a crucifix. Why does a symbol retain such power regardless of how frequently we see it? Ladies and Gentlemen I am a stranger, on the outside looking in. And I believe that symbolism has become a cudgel. Perhaps it always has been. These graphic metaphors ostensibly have a direct line to our lower, more primitive selves. Understand however, they have no power but what we give them. By way of example: I say a crucifix is meaningless. To a person of that faith, a cross may elicit feelings of warmth and belonging, comfort, relief. However, an atheist, agnostic, or a member of a competing faith may be made to feel unhappiness, dread, bemusement or exasperation. The point being: As the symbol has no fixed meaning, I put it to you that it has no meaning. Meaning is not innate. Like the middle finger, we give the symbol power, and in so doing, give whosoever wields the symbol power over us. To some, this will seem obvious. To others, it bears mentioning. The intent of my work is, first, to be full of interest, of rich and inviting colors, of strange and often bewildering forms and, at the same time, symbolically ambiguous. They acknowledge and even celebrate the fact that artist and viewer share responsibility for their meaning. In my piece “Venus of the Sprawl” my intent is to illustrate how a symbol, given consciousness, might not wish to remain as they are. The subject herself has great meaning, as do the blade, rusted pipes, hot orange sky, the blood and pain and tears, the grotesque expression. All are symbols. If we were to let that painting’s symbolism dominate our wills completely we could let ourselves become overwhelmed, repulsed. However, in the subject’s own frame of reference, symbols are not ethereally powerful but solid, simple, objectified. And that is just the point. I wish you to view my work with the foreknowledge that meaning is imbued and not innate. To facilitate this, the paintings themselves do not reflect our reality but a universe where our symbols, stripped of their context, fall from power and become just another collection of random patterns. In the hypothetical world of “the Doldrums” meaning is meaningless. Our symbols have no power. But they have consciousness. Indeed, It is a world made up of the things we make up. A place where dreams have become ecosystems, ideas are carnivorous, and symbols are merely brick and mortar. Welcome to the Doldrums… On an island, ringed with countries of varied form and nature, surrounded by an ocean of ruined skyscrapers and pitted tar-macadam, slowly and unceasingly as a glacier sinking at its epicenter into the nothingness sat the Doldrums. Waves of glass and steel and concrete pounded the fine powder beaches of the Deadpan as foreign dreams from far-flung realities lifted creatures, aberrant and foreboding, out of the bare earth and back again with the Corpse-Counters making endless record of each in its turn. The Sprawl, as it has come to be called, a roiling expanse of rusted iron and abandoned masonry, is us. Our dream of civilization, made real in our world by sweat, blood, and force of will; made real in the Doldrums by our subsequent neglect, caprice, and decadence. Thus, the borders of the Doldrums are defined by things derelict, rotted and irredeemably ours. Half broken and half submerged in bone-dry dunes lay buildings, like ancient shipwrecks, looming skeletal and unmoving against an orange sky. And living in each, were the refugees of a thousand thousand ruined worlds. Toward the center of the Doldrums, deriving sustenance from the more fertile reaches of the Deadpan, grew the Sawbrack. Twisted as a rat king, barbed as a legion with pikes, and teaming with a terrible swarm of faintly glowing insects, the Sawbrack reared up immense, creaking fitfully. Groaning, as if every stick and leaf were poised to stretch it’s coils and, in a flicker, eviscerate the mists that wafted silkily amidst the quivering brambles. Farther in, sleeping under the shadow of giant vine strangled trees the third band of the Doldrums lay still and quiet as a pool of ink, deathly and frigid, but concealing beneath its surface, life never to be seen. The Lull; black ocean under snowy sky. No sound was there of wind nor lapping of errant waves on an indiscernible shore; only a maddening calm, as if it were the tomb of time itself. As if the void had disgorged a fetid lake of dreams never dreamed, life never born, never and nothing and nobody and all all all were dark. Leagues on and thrusting skyward out of the brink of The Lull was a land of reticulated iron webbed with iridescent pale stone. Like a great and gleaming coral reef it was, so near the funnel's edge that on a clear day one could gaze straight up and see the whole metallic country folding back on itself like the maw of a colossal lamprey. And The Maw it was named. Far from quiet was the fourth country. dissonant screams echoed to and fro, bounding between veiny burnished monoliths like thrumming wails from an adamantine cello. Life, a type of life, thrived here. Everywhere were floating fish and scurrying rodents, cloistered gastropods and clicking mollusks; but all metallic and cold. As the Maw laid back its teeth toward the next band the screams died down and the last of the mechanical life skittered, terrified, the firmament shrank into a glassy tunnel. This was the great smooth throat of the Doldrums, the final naked expanse before the plunge into nothing. It was a lifeless place, polished and sterile, a stainless steel infinity. The mind played tricks and reeled and broke, chasing aberrant reflections away to icy death. All around hummed a single, deep, horrible note. And this, the fifth country, had no name. |