A portrait of Mam on a lazy Sunday

A portrait of Scott

 

• Check out some Badass Lego Guns! (...and buy some cool kicks)

Wasp

Metamorphosis

• Pen sketch, Pencil sketch, with watercolour and pastel accents (and a Kafka quote)

Butterfly #2

Butterfly #1

Flyswatter

Technical study of a Damselfly

• Collage with masking tape (various kinds) newsprint onto acrylic, watercolour and fineliner.

Damselfly Study

Sepiatone

• Mixed Media; Watercolour, Gouache, Sepia pen.

Weeds

• Mixed Media: Watercolour and water soluble wax pastels over pencil sketch with acrylic. 

Timewaves

• Pencil, watercolour.

The dandelion is the flower of choice for this sketch. Considered a weed; delicate and fragile and beautiful, regardless. 

• And also symbolic of Time;

...which is a concept I struggle with. I just cant settle upon the way I feel about Time.

Time is absurd. a worthless throwaway concept that should have little hold over our lives. 

Or is it the only concept of any value, defining our very being. The single most important factor we could strive to understand. 

I just don't know. 

Wasteland

Bodhi

• Mixed media collage; Watercolour, Pencil sketch, water-based marker pen & fineliners.

Buddhism and the Lotus Flower. Symbolising the Buddhist quest for enlightenment and a higher spiritual state; the lotus flower grows in muddy waters but blooms into a pure beautiful flower regardless.

Meditation is highly valued as a means of knowledge and growth, and using mantras (like the traditional Om Mani Padhe Hum) is common in Buddhism; the script used in the sketch here is Sanskrit. 

Sakura

• Mixed media: Watercolour, Acrylic, Watercolour pencils and Sketching pencils.

The Eternal Sleep

• Mixed media; Pencil sketch with acrylic, watercolour and original prose. 

The inspiration for this sketch has its roots in traditional poppy symbolism;

• war and death
• opium and a sleep-like state. 

I've adopted these themes and ran them parallel with one another other in order to explain a journey towards a more subconscious, higher level of existence that we should be striving for. A transcendence past our mundane society (complete with their wars, mass industry, cities, pollution and corruption), to a more spiritual, purer level of existence which can be attained via the transition of death, or a more dreamlike, meditative state, and hallucinogens, i guess! Basically, it's about the desire to attain that next level; the spirit over the everyday. 

But in trying to explain this, I struggled against the truth that we're currently trapped in this everyday default world. We're immersed in it's corruption, pollution and daily routine. This is the struggle. Against the overwhelming bombardment of dirty, dusty war-zones, consumerism, media propaganda, roadsides, cities and industries. Society. All of it. All the colours are muted, everything diluted and washed out. Beautiful flowers are portrayed as weeds.  The poppy is symbolic of this struggle to attain a higher, purer, spiritual level of existence of which we should be reaching for.