Nosepickers

Nosepickers

In 1997 I was sitting in a pub in North Shields with my old school friend John Hussey, watching a man in a pink shirt at the next table picking his nose and eating it.John responded viscerally, with deep disgust. I recorded the incident in verse. Re-reading that verse to John over the phone in 2020, I was delighted to realise that his horror at this memory had not lessened. I decided to recreate the image in a painting. That was my first nosepicker painting. Within 10 months, thanks to a nomination by Dannielle Hodson of Outside In, the Outsider artists’ organisation, two of my newer ones – ‘Family Picking Noses’ and ‘Mourners Picking Noses’ – were being exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Most of my nosepicker paintings are based on old black and white photographs, discarded memories from recently-dead people’s house clearances that have ended up in plastic boxes among hundreds of others on stalls at Tynemouth flea market. These are photos which, when taken, would have commemorated people’s finest moments, their happiest days, the bright spots in otherwise often difficult lives. There is always trouble in the background in most people’s lives. While each photo celebrates its subjects’ individuality (“Look at me! Look at us! What a grand time we’re having!”), when considered alongside all the others in the plastic boxes, what is most striking is their similarity, their sameness. As Henri Lefebvre (2008) observes, bourgeois individualism ‘implies the dreary, ludicrous repetition of individuals who are curiously similar in their way of being themselves and of keeping themselves to themselves, in their speech, their gestures, their everyday habits.’ In Erich Fromm’s (2001) terms, the normal person is the person who has learned to want to be the person he is required to be.Each of us has vast potential, yet we find ourselves conforming to the roles prescribed for us, doing what we have to do instead of what we might have done. It’s oppressive and it’s absurd. We might as well all just be picking our noses.

 

Mortraits

Mortraits

In Autumn 2015, I’d completed a set of small acrylic paintings of Peter Sutcliffe’s victims for a Mr Norbert Merryweather of Gosforth. I was wondering what to do next when my gaze fell upon Peter Mortimer. Mortimer is a septuagenarian playwright and poet from Cullercoats here on the North East coast and a friend of mine. He is as absurd as most of his works are. He eschews convention.
I’m not sure why I reproduced Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Pope Pius VII with Mortimer’s head on it, but I did. For some reason it gained attention locally, and before long I was being commissioned to produce more reproductions of classics featuring Mortimer’s physiognomy. the Mona Lisa, different popes. I became obsessed. Velasquez, Goya, Van Houten, Munch, Da Vinci, Manet, Mengs, Passaroti, Waterhouse, Walther, Etty, Degas, Modigliani, Theodoescu-Sion, Bougureau, Chagall, Sargent, Hopper – artists I’d never or barely heard of, I was ripping off their work and replacing their forms of beauty with Mortimer’s mug. He developed distinctly feminine breasts. The brown finger is his ‘gravy finger’, a symbolic reference to the fact that if he’s ever out for a meal, he’ll finish everything on everyone else’s plate as well as his own. Collectively these paintings became known as ‘Mortraits’.
Mortimer loved it; it was all good publicity. I’d say that as I knocked them out, even if it was only over a few months, my painting skills improved moderately. The internationally-recognised Stuckist artist Paul Harvey, who lives up our street, identified me as a fellow Stuckist and sent photos of my work to the Stuckist founder, Charles Thomson, who confirmed my status.
Following surgery and during time away from work in autumn 2016, I was invited to hold two exhibitions, one at the Whitley Bay Film Festival and the other at The Exchange in North Shields. There was a full-page review on page 3 of The Journal, Newcastle’s main newspaper. Local critic Martin Sarosi pointed out that “Most artists spend years learning to paint and aspiring to exhibitions. You’ve done it the other way round.”
Sometimes now I look at the Mortraits and all I can see is imperfection. Technically they’re ridiculous and basically stupid. Other times I look and I’m astonished at their complicated beauty. And I think, well, that more or less sums up what existence is about – banal profundity or profound banality. In The Journal article, Mortimer is quoted as saying: “The display at The Exchange is the only arts exhibition I have been to where people were laughing their heads off. Now I feel quite flattered.” It’s all absurd, complex and bewildering.
Peter Mortimer is the author of numerous anthologies, plays, and accounts of personal journeys, including Broke Through Britain: One Man’s Penniless Odyssey, I Married the Angel of the North, Rainbird: The Tragedy of a Painter and The Chess Traveller. His forthcoming One Hundred Nights in Gerrards Cross is awaited eagerly.

Jack and Bill and the Fogrunt Amulet

In 2018 I was asked to produce a set of charcoal illustrations for the publication by The Iron Press of Jack and Bill and The Fogrunt Amulet, an epic poem by The Brothers Grime. Part lurid fairy tale, part dystopian parable, this work is a caustic commentary on the impact of pornography on the social imagination. Set in faraway Cloudland during the reign of King Wobblyknobble, it tells of how the Fogrunt Amulet falls into the hands of the apparently insignificant Kitty Flaps and of the sordid events that transpire. The powers of the amulet, a treasured charm woven from the golden hairs of the long-departed Mother Feakle, must be destroyed before the terrible Black Sow wreaks havoc. Enter Jack and Bill, two oafs from Cobblerswood charged with the momentous task. Stuffed with onanist apothecaries, furtive whacking and dongers turned to stone, this is a gloriously irreverent work unlike almost every other opus in the cultured world of poetry publication. More recently I have reworked some of these charcoal drawings as acrylic paintings.