Completed 'Risk Assessment 6: Fill Your Lungs'

'Risk Assessment 6:  Fill Your Lungs', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 60 cm X 45 cm, 2013

Here’s the latest of my paper-based ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces, completed earlier this week.  It’s No.6 in this occasional series, begun at the start of the year, and utilises the same general format, hazard ‘candy stripe’ motifs and grungy text elements as the previous five.  As before, the text implies a potential hazard to life or wellbeing with the unwritten preamble, ‘They Will…’

I’ve already alluded to the way these visual outbursts tend to reflect my anger or frustration at human behaviour and the machinations of the powerful, as relayed to us via the news media.  Mostly, I suppose, they are a protest against the sense of powerlessness many of us habitually feel, and an attempt at some form of catharsis.  I’m sure it hardly needs spelling out that ‘Risk Assessment 6: Fill Your Lungs’ is another response to the routine atrocities being acted out in Syria of late.

Certainly, the ‘Risk Assessments’ are far more direct than anything else I do at the moment and pictorially, little more than simple carriers for text.  In that respect, I suppose they look toward the more polemical intent of an artist like Bob & Roberta Smith in his sign painting mode.  I wouldn’t want everything I do to be this politically, satirically or sociologically engaged but sometimes it is a relief to just get things off my chest, (and out of my head).  

The other thing about them is that, (by my standards), they are generally produced quite quickly.  In a frustrating year, when my artistic progress has been steady but a bit ponderous, it feels good to have just rattled out a couple of these in fairly short order.