House of the Fisher King.

Oils, 170 x 58 cm

Available For Sale (though I must restretch the canvas beforehand)

This piece is about 10 years old. I did it while in first year university and it was one of the pieces that convinced me to study painting and not follow sculpture. The name is from Northern European mythology - the castle of the Fisher King was where the grail was kept according to some versions of the King Arthur myth.

And please, if you at all curious about me, read this:

Hey folks
It is I, artist guy Paul, inventor of religions and slayer of mighty pies; I am he who fills out ALL FORMS in the dark with a crayon and I am presently planning on CRASHING A PLANE INTO THE BIG BROTHER HOUSEAnd if anyone wants to help let me know.
Well it may be too late now as I really wanted to do it when it was full. One would hope to catch more moronic lifeless passionless clone losers that way. But heyThere are always more.Always…I am in some limbo, some almost land, some never was, some place spattered with light and pressed with scarred hands and almost heard.
I am definitively indefinitive – let me attempt more clarity – nothing for me is clear. I don’t know where I am, I can’t seem to see anything, nothing – it is not even the black the dark that I know so well this is some nether-state. Unfamiliar and so fucking RANDOM.Sure, yeah I understand, I have seen faith, and some simple differentiation of degree and belief leads me into a desert of meaning and all our cries – I know this it is more real to me than the keys that my sore fingers hit – our cries are unheard and go nowhere but into the dead, empty night.
This meaningless world. Yes. The more I learn (and I learn and I learn I can feel the secrets in my TEETH I know so much and crave so much more) the more it is clear to me that belief is…
I can’t start there. I will begin again.I won’t talk about God.
I have been – having trouble working. I don’t really want to paint. I have been writing fiction and writing music. I have worked a great deal anyway and am still doing about a piece a week. I consider it all, think about it too much; too sharply; too hard.
I feel like I am coasting, like there is no touchstone of life hard enough to jolt me back again into the sense that I am, in actuality, HERE. Living, being, breathing.
Someone very close to me said something that scratched at my heart – she said “do you know the word inspire means to breathe into? Is that why you do it?”I can’t – I can’t seem to work out what she meant.I have little feather cuts on my palm, on the palm on my right hand in fanning straight lines. Bloodless scratches. Shallow. I don’t understand anything about why I make them. I do know that I am strong enough not to let them get any bigger or any deeper. Not right now. I do not do it out of self loathing, and even the IDEA of doing it for attention makes me seethe with black killing rage. I find myself looking at it now and then, in different lights – a marked arc, artificial and within my control. I would cut words but I have never written any that I would consider powerful enough to wear on my skin, and I would never, not EVER consider using someone else’s.Any of those who cut will, I think, understand. The desire to do it, no matter the years between the times when our will bends enough to make blood appear, it never leaves.
I imagine myself at the altar, on my deathbed, about to make love to the woman of my purest dreams, finishing the best work of my life – thinking of the colour of blood and of making a small incision into my arm.How truly mad. Irreconcilable and more real than the fucking objects around me.I don’t have the despair. Not right now. I should be grateful for its absence, but I am not. I am not. My mind is wild with desire and hunger I rage and rage at NOTHING I don’t know what to DO, there is nothing for me here, there never was this is a mistake some vast loud chattering illness I was supposed to die long ago I know it I do.I think the true knowledge or at least belief that there are no Gods and certainly no magic, there are no spirits in the woods in the dark in concord against us - is actually more likely to defeat us than the conviction of their reality. At least the tribesman clutching his sword and shivering and making some ritual sign of arcane defense – at least, for him, there would be the sense that his terror was reasonable, directed and sane. If the world is emptied of such things – then our terror knows no manufactured license – we are trapped with the living reality that what we are really afraid of is ourselves.
Of the emptiness in us.
The endlessness of it.
Its truth, hard against our eyes.

Perhaps the best reason we have for the existence of God is that it gives a NAME TO OUR FEAR.