Completed Painting: 'Untitled (From The New School) 11'

'Untitled (From The New School) 11', Acrylics, Paper Collage & Mixed Media,
30 cm X 30 cm X 10.6 cm, 2019 

January dribbles on in its customary drab manner, and finds me still whittling away at various existing projects in a not especially dynamic manner.  For all that, recent weeks have already seen the arrival of four new instalments in my 'Untitled (From The New School)' series of paintings, with relatively little struggle.  Here is the fifth, most recent member of this new cohort (and the first completed piece of 2019), 'Untitled (From The New School) 11'.
  

To be honest, working on these ideally suits my current situation.  I've been tempted, of late, to reassess the work/art/life balance of my current existence, slightly - whilst also dealing with the fatiguing distraction of my knackered old knees, as they seemingly enter a new phase of painful dysfunctionality.  At such a time, it's useful to be able to dip back into a series like this -  in which the underlying rationale, and even the standardised format were long ago decided.  It's really just a case of intuitively selecting yet another means of depiction/application, and settling into the pleasure of simply getting it done.  

Pretty much everything about this series is self consciously referential of something else pre-existing.  Indeed, as previously explained, its very origin lies in a blatant piece of appropriation, and often, the stylistic variations revealed with each new version feel like deliberately donning a new suit of borrowed clothes.  However, anyone familiar with my own oeuvre may spot that, in this case - I'm mostly borrowing from myself.  The ragged, mixed-media Expressionism (and emblematic palette) of '11' , is clearly lifted from my own 'Flagging' series, exhibited in Nottingham, last year.

Of course, those pieces were part of the completely separate 'This S(c)eptic Isle' project, and were perhaps the least sophisticated manifestation of its implied (and pretty topical) societal angst.  The question here would thus be, what is to be achieved by applying their tropes to a different body of work - one concerned with the nature and functions of formal Education?

Whatever else the viewer might find for themselves, I guess it's impossible not to recognise that the life of a school, and the educational values it may purport to represent, are inescapably subject to wider socio-political contexts.  At certain times, this might appear to operate on the elevated plane of competing philosophical or ideological orthodoxies; at others it may just be a case of crisis management in a period of chaos and decay.  

Might then, the impetuous treatment and implied entropy of '11' reflect the apparent  psychotic fragmentation of a society, in which, seemingly - the centre may no longer hold?  Is the educational edifice here depicted struggling to prevail, and maintain some illusion of a coherent future, amidst all that uncertainty?  Alternatively, might the ill-informed 'democratic' decisions of 'the people' themselves be the result of a seriously compromised, non-analytical education system?  Can the pretence of utilitarianism, and assumptions regarding the status quo - reflected in the educational priorities of recent decades, remain relevant within a system no longer able to supply workable solutions for large portions of the populace?  Or, did I just fancy doing a messy one this time?  I'll leave it for you to decide.