The not so great but secret show.

On the 20th of May 2023 I decided that I really needed a painting to hang over my bed. I wanted something recognisable, not too cliched, or too weird, just something pleasant that should any woman be foolish enough to go out with me ever again, it won’t send them running screaming out of the door. I went through all the genres and artists and nothing seemed right and I also realised that I had ‘gripes’ with a lot of the works that sprang to mind. I eventually decided to do a ‘version’ of something iconic, so I could play with an artwork that was way about my pay grade and make it my own. I decided on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as I was horrified by how sexist that picture is and indeed the story behind it, filled as it is by scantily clad women, including a rape victim in the form of Chloris / Flora… What Venus needed was a nice, practical, swimming cossy and I was going to give it to her. Once I was finished, I wanted to take on some of the other ‘classics’ of art and I just kept going and going until I eventually had eighty three paintings / drawings plus extra panels for triptychs and such.

One of the most annoying challenges was that I have nowhere in my new flat to do ‘messy’ work, so I couldn’t use acrylics, let alone oil paints, and so I found myself adapting techniques in watercolour to get as close as possible to mediums with different opacities, viscosities and drying times. It was an interest challenge though as it made me really think hard about the original images and appreciate them even more than I already did. I also had to truncate the scale of many works, taking something sized to fit the wall of a large room and condensing it down to a sheet of A3 paper. I also couldn’t spend years on one image as had been done with many of the original works.

Somewhere along the line I decided that I would need to do something with all these images, a book probably, and maybe some prints and even the odd bit of merch and this would need me to make sure that all the works were up to a standard that I would be happy to see them reproduced, which meant that they all needed ‘fixing’ in photoshop to some extent or other, which meant another four months work on top of the seven months already spent painting and drawing. I now have to get them in an order that makes sense and put a little bit of writing with them, meaning that I will have spent at least a year on this collection; and all because I had an annoying blank space on a wall that needed to be filled.

I do think it’s funny though, I made a major show’s worth of artwork by accident; one that will never be seen hung on walls in their original forms. I don’t have the clout or the money to do such things and if I think too hard, I can get quite upset at some of the crap that gets displayed through nothing more than schmoozing and nepotism. Still, focusing on such things never helps, so I have chosen to find it amusing, keep my head down, finishes the book and then move on to the next project… and the world will barely notice.