Newly finished canvas, ‘Let There Be More Light’, oil 90cm x 90cm

Inspired by the old Pink Floyd song of the same name from when they were still a psychedelic rock band, from the Saucerful of Secrets LP 1968, and visions it first brought to my head when listening to it many years ago (and still does); hip hop hippy, pre acid house walkman trip man.

For two weeks we relished the bliss of perfect English midsummer in the most mystical part of the country, Glastonbury, where ley lines meet and legends were born, in The Vale of Avalon, the ancient mythic gateway to the heathen goddess; a place of pilgrimage for millennia.

I was onsite with the team of militant revolutionary dreamers and genius engineers known as Arcadia, easily the best sound system around and quite possibly the greatest show on earth.

Their meticulous attention to detail and fantastic organisation extends to the busy site canteen who kept me fed and watered with an ever-changing array of fresh veggie delights and herbal teas….

I painted anarcho punk slogans since 82 then graffiti at the birth of UK hip hop in 84, onto London’s tube system in 86 through the golden age of train graffiti moving to acid house backdrops in 89. The nineties and new millenium saw me painting at traveller squat parties and Reclaim the Streets protest raves. Throughout the quiet renaissance of classical, surreal and visionary oil painting I was at the easel and fused my skills back with graffiti in Shoreditch in 2009 then onto MuTate Britain with the Mutoid Waste Company in Ladbroke Grove under the Westway…

Now in 2010 I feel glad to have played a small part by painting for the next underground zeitgeist, one which takes influence and energy from all those phenomenon and more, but boldly maps out a new frontier that is purely its’ own…ARCADIA.

Like all underground revolutionary movements the gold rush is for the inner treasure. The ultimate reward is the accomplishment of the dream and the actualisation of the idea. At Glastonbury 2010 Arcadia surpassed all expectations and reached dizzying new heights of inspiration, engineering, teamwork, sculpture, music, lighting, pyrotechnics, performance art and energy as this film shows….

The Build

When we arrived onsite the Afterburner stage was still in its early stages, the ‘legs’ of the spider are actually scrap from customs xray machines that used to scan containers and lorries. Pure genius…

The core of the beast is expertly manoevered into place…

…and it shows its’ face.

In keeping with Arcadia’s militant branding and apocalyptic atmosphere I did the line-up board using their trademark stencil lettering, and carefully distressed the fragments of plane for that ‘hauled out of the swamp 5 years after the crash’ look….

…with lots of help from capable hands.

The entrance arch is a couple of modified plane wings, possibly from a glider, it’d been rubbed down to the bare aluminium so to keep the burnished metal intact on the ‘pipes’ I used Belton’s amazing transparent black spray paint to get the relief modelling without losing the wonderful texture which gleamed from underneath as the sun caught the metal…The design was finalised between myself and Pip Rush and based on carvings on an ancient Aztec  temple….

Here’s a video of the build in progress.

The line-up boards go up….

I then cut back over the black with Belton’s burner chrome to get a contrast against the aluminium and carefully painted the pop rivets and ‘crazy paving’ seams by hand.

Pip was keen to use my ‘Circuit Splat’ style so I modified it to pure abstraction with a vivid tribal background on some pieces of aeroplane scrap to hang behind the massive ‘Arc Bar’, the sun was pounding down…

After painting ‘til twilight the lights go on on the new Afterburner for the very first time and the eerie entity blinks into life.

Next day the crew finish building ‘stage left’ so I can start the piece.

Across the field the punk tent takes shape

After being branded with the Arcadia logo by their prop maker and effects guy, Simon, he begins work on the dirty-metal-effect background for my piece….

…and I start blocking in the arrows. Some respectful inspiration drawn from amigo Keen One here, but in 3 dimensions and distressed with a strong Elate/Arcadia twist….

….and lots of rivets, seams, gleams, glints and the Arcadia logo in the centre….

….everyone seemed to really like this.

Here the graffiti began to fuse with scrap art by Simon and Sam…

Finally after sweat and dedication, blisters, sprains and minor sunstroke Arcadia opened on Thursday 24th June 2010 to the public ….

  …who went nuts….while many crew take the opportunity to sleep until rested before re-emerging to enjoy the weekend.

My art at the Arcadia Arc Bar ‘scuse the poor shots

You could feel the heat on your face from the other side of the field. Experience Arcadia, they’re doing amazing things.

I’ll let the Lords of Lightning sign off this post as only they know how.

All pictures of Arcadia build by me and Jenny apart from a few select shots of Afterburner show and Glastonbury used  with permission Creative Commons and taken by Luke Blackmore, lusciousblopster, mark-vauxhall, medalliamagpie, Tangentical, fussy onion, Al Green midlander123 and bfirsh; thanks to all.

Massive thanks to Pip and Bertie and all Arcadia crew.

Now he’s back 20 years later, along with oldskool steel writers Fuel, Skore, Mear, Crok, Don myself and a few of London’s more new skool to take the vibe back to the raw, enabling a potent and complementary mix of the hardcore underground vibes and tribes….

and back inside for another shot of me and Vibes….

……and onto the wild, diverse art within, here’s Jimmy South of War Boutique

Lyle Doghead, LRRY and friend

Elate, Obey

Anarchist Crockery by Carrie Reichart

In Dog We Trust by Jolly Good, made with real dollar bills…

  Vera Bong

Dotmaster

The toilets…

New Arrivals…

What I have posted is a fraction of what is there, you really have to get down to this 12,000 foot space and experience the most revolutionary art happening London, probably even the world has ever seen.

The future is unwritten!!!

The Mutate Britain shop is now online check it here!!!!

Families are welcome to this multisensory extravaganza!.

Full dates and opening times below. We look forwarding to seeing you!

Opening times:

Opens December 4th to December 20th – FRI / SAT / SUN

Fri – 2pm -10pm
Sat-1pm – 10pm
Sun – 12pm-9pm

We are also open 2 Wednesdays for the Portobello Winter Festival on the 9th & 16th December – 6pm -10pm

FRI & SAT (NO ENTRY AFTER 9PM)

SUN (NO ENTRY AFTER 8PM)

£2 before 6pm / £3 there after’

www.mutatebritain.co.uk

www.mutatebritain.wordpress.com

facebook mutatebritain

www.myspace.com/mutatebritain

Here’s some more pictures from the MuTate Britain Winter Show. I’m going to be adding a whole load more as a separate post at the weekend at some point as I need to rephotograph stuff to a half decent standard.

This has to be one of the best art exhibitions anywhere ever in my humble opinion and I’m very glad to have had a hand in it….If you like your surrealism apocalyptic your graffiti groundbreaking your grime genuine and your people straight up this is the place for you…..We kick of with Rubbish Fairy and House of Doll

Mear

Skore TRC

Crok

Achy

Towns

Fuel

Joe Rush

   Elate Vibes Lyle Doghead and LRRY and Pakka

Lyle Doghead and LRRY and Pakka with plane by Sam Haggerty and Dotmasters

Teddy Baden

Joe Rush

Wreckage International

Joe Rush and others

Sam Haggerty

War Boutique

Joe Rush

Sam Haggerty and Joe Rush

Obey Giant

Wolf and PXL

Andy Seize

Elate Vibes

Dotmasters aka Bagsy

Sam Hagarty and Dotmasters

Liam Cordy

Joe Rush

Mutoid Dave and others…

Elate Cazbee

Pure Indulgence

Families are welcome to this multisensory extravaganza!.

Full dates and opening times below. We look forwarding to seeing you!

Opening times:

Opens December 4th to December 20th – FRI / SAT / SUN

Fri – 2pm -10pm
Sat-1pm – 10pm
Sun – 12pm-9pm

We are also open 2 Wednesdays for the Portobello Winter Festival on the 9th & 16th December – 6pm -10pm

FRI & SAT (NO ENTRY AFTER 9PM)

SUN (NO ENTRY AFTER 8PM)

£2 before 6pm / £3 there after’

www.mutatebritain.co.uk

www.mutatebritain.wordpress.com

facebook mutatebritain

www.myspace.com/mutatebritain

‘If This Is Peace…’ 

Oil on Canvas

I’ve been posting a lot of graffiti based stuff lately, but I never forget my love for good old oil on canvas, so here’s a little something I knocked up way back in the late 90’s called ‘Living Under The Lines’.

I realise it’s already on my main site but thought it deserved a post on the blog as the definitions of what categorisation it may fall into seem have been redefined

I suppose now they call it Lowbrow/ Pop Surrealism. I like to think of it maybe as Urban Visionary but hell what’s in a name, label, tag, school or ism?

It is what it is.

To me at the time it was just a feeling I wanted to get onto canvas. I think I hit the mark.

I thought I’d drag it out and post it as it seems to have gained new significance…

Phosphene Generation: Cropped from Original Oil Painting- Inverted in Photoshop

I’ve started some new canvases, based on some old ideas. Some of these are mutating and jumping off onto paper into graffiti outlines.

rant begins after the jump….

I’ve dug into some old writing of mine from way back, in which I touch on the basis of this concept, expanding on a line of enquiry put forward by, and quote from Aldous Huxley.

Nature in its savage state is bristling with…clues and cues to the eternal, even those which do not appear immediately do so when viewed either up close or from afar.

A Sung painting of faraway mountains, clouds and torrents is transporting; but so are the close ups of tropical leaves in Douanier Rousseau’s jungles, when I look at the Sung landscape I…(or one of my ‘not Is’ is reminded) of the crags, the boundless expanses of plain, the luminous skies and seas of the minds antipodes…in leaves with their architecture of veins, their stripes and mottlings permeate the depth of their interlacing greenery, and something in me is reminded of those living patterns of the Visionary world. Huxley, Aldous-Heaven and Hell  (1956)

Magnified or distant examples life forms, in fact close ups of any of natures building blocks, the systems, shapes and dimensions nature finds success in, are in fact exactly the same species of systems, shapes and dimensions that comprise the “flora and fauna” of the inner world.

For millennia these were described in many ways without the necessary technical nomenclature to denote what maybe more accurate comparisons with micro organisms, nebulae or microscopic worlds.

They used instead the only similes they knew, treasure from the deepest, darkest places under the ground the only objects whose properties mimicked transcendental perfection, those endless births and proliferations of geometric forms in their sparkle turning into ever more beautiful visions which transport the beholder beyond in an instant.

“The topaz and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and the carbuncle and gold.” Is the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel’s description of his vision of what he calls the “Garden of Eden”.

The Vedic Otherworld was Utterakuru and is

“…watered by lakes of golden lotuses. There are rivers by thousands full of leaves…of sapphire and lapis lazuli… the lakes resplendent like the morning sun are adorned by golden beds of red lotus”.Huxley, Aldous-Heaven and Hell  (1956)

The ancient Pagan Welsh ‘paradise’ was Ynisvitrin, the Celtic ‘Isle of Glass’. The Buddhists’ paradises comprise of stones of fire. These methods of description are the best physical phenomenon that people at this point in history could reference in an attempt to describe the visual ‘symptoms’ of an unrelatable ecstatic event.

The Hubble Telescope, fractal geometry and electron microscopes, are now showing for the first time physical manifestations of this universal energy which has been experienced internally and told of in legends since the dawn of man.

It seems astonishing, at first, that so little in the way of definite conclusion or correlation has been acknowledged, but with further thought the two worlds, those of subjective enlightenment, and that of objective technological observation are and will always be intrinsically divided, we can however glimpse a thread that leads toward a higher order.

Anyone who finds this interesting should read Huxley’s book which is the best I’ve read on the transcendental aesthetics which unconsciously influence our every waking moment and manifest throughout history in the art, myth and folklore of humankind.

What strange new lands coalesce and take form….

as the frontiers of technology meet the want of mankind?