I've been neglecting my blogs recently, in fact everything, I'm still in shock, it's my father, he died last week. I was informed by two local coppers who did their best to deliver the news with some sensitivity, but to be honest, you can't help going into shock when your dad dies, no matter who tells you. I've been mentally stuck somewhere vague and rather vacant, my partner Chris tells me it's shock, she's probably right. He was relatively young, Dad, in his early 60's and looked far younger. We'd lost contact for years, in fact I have lost contact with my whole family over the years, it's just one of those things, people suffer enough, blood becomes meaningless and eventually you find your true family elsewhere.
My parents married far far too young, that's the truth, they've been divorced since my most formative years, and as Mum's life took a corner and landed in a far brighter and happier future, my father, well let's say he didn't live the most contented of lives, in fact bad luck and tragedy seemed to follow him wherever he went. I recognise the same in myself, but I have been luckier in many ways. A few years ago, after a very long estrangement, he contacted me, he was having financial troubles, and although we could hardly spare it ourselves, we managed to get him on his feet again. However the early death of his long-term partner Linda was the beginning of the end. He began to drink heavily, all the time, and it got the better of him.
I didn't want to write again, or at least publicly quite yet, because I knew no matter what I wrote about the subject would always steer towards my father's death, but perhaps, on some level, this post might help someone else out there in the same position. I am not a religious man, my beliefs are vague and unsubstantiated when it comes to life beyond the carbon-based lifeforms we inhabit in a space-time continuum of our own description, and at least psychologically, our own making. Without the constructs of pragmatic ritual, without the roots of traditional metaphorical behaviour and rites practised by churches of all description, I've had to emotionally live by my wits, perceptually advance my understanding of existence. Perhaps to make a formal attempt to find solace, make some vague sense of the events unfolding, give purpose to a tragedy. However I know deep down it's all part of a simple process, a natural one that can take any form depending on one's character, in order to help each of us physically and mentally remain sound throughout times like these. I know one thing and that is that art helps. Art really helps. For the last few days I haven't been able to pick up a pen without scrawling like a lunatic, embittered doodles without form or meaning, but the art of others, other minds and visions, that helps. Visually consuming difference, that helps. It's not what I see, it what I interpret through others, their vision of the world around us, and/or its possibilities.
Recently I discovered the art of Alex Andreyev, his work isn't what most would describe as particularly comforting and peaceful, not by any means, but his habit of twisting the parameters of the familiar and benign charges my mind to some extent, if only to remember the delights of possibility again, be they good or bad. Which, when you think about it, on a universal scale, is simply highly subjective quibbling. Alex Andreyev is based in Saint-Petersburg Russia, and has been working as a digital and graphic artist for over 20 years. Now working almost exclusively digitally with basic Photoshop and Corel, he limits his brushes and presets to maintain a feeling of reality in his art works, avoiding the over production of many of those in his field. He describes his work as surrealism, but to me his art steers towards a sub-genre, not quite invented yet, that inserts, incepts and intercepts brief moments of familiarity with an unnerving feeling that just beyond the the oblivion of the obvious lies something vast, something tearing at the seams of our own dimension, frightening yet awe inspiring, a reality that makes a mockery of our own assumptions of our brief existence here on Earth. A microcosm of the grand fantasist movement jam packed with every Freudian and Jungian treat on offer.
Andreyev offers an allegorical pinhole view of possible and alternate futures, presents and pasts, slithers of something else, somewhere else, imbued with a strong sense of familiarity that can at times bring on a shiver or two of recognition. The art works range in style, some of the most powerful appear more like doctored photographs, and in turn are rather reminiscent of some of the trick photography adopted by the Spiritualist movement of the Victorian era, in order to further their cause of disproving the sceptics and gaining respect for their wild claims within both the church and science.
I, as did my father, love the late 60's and early 70's take on sci-fi, everything, everywhere was a conspiracy of some kind, perhaps it's a family tradition to think the worst in order not to be disappointed in the long run, I can't really tell you that one objectively. However I have always taken some kind of gratification in seeing the shapes and patterns of society, politics, technology, and more in order to prepare myself for the next bolt from the blue. Sci-fi used to be good at that too, nowadays it's filled with glibly hopeful sentiments, mainly that technology will save the day, or obversely provides a downright apocalyptic, vision with no chance for anyone to do anything about it. Still, Andreyev has for me taken the right and most pertinent angle when it comes to sci-fi's influence on his work, an eerie feeling that our lack of knowledge about the true nature of our consensual reality leaves us grappling with the idea that we may be missing something here, something really big, something that should we all encounter it simultaneously, would either collapse our society in sudden fright or evolve us instantly with the delights of a new found wonder.
Who knows. Life, it's a funny old game.
Anyway see more of Alex Andreyev and buy his large scale posters at www.alexandreev.com.
