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Already Thursday again, eh? Back to 2002 we go… collage days this time, with a piece called “Dreams at the Hollow Veil.”
It’s another one from that same series of surreal landscapes I posted the other week. This one came a bit later on, when I’d started to get the hang of the techniques and it all began to click proper.
Round about then, I remember picking up this mad book of digital art in the discount bin at The Works in Stockport, "The Ten Dimensional Maze" by Ian and Ted Arundell. Came out in ’95, I think. A Lewis Carroll-inspired digital tr1p, full of surreal dream-logic and warped little worlds. (Pretty sure I’ve still got it knocking about somewhere.) Proper strange stuff. Like someone had got Max Ernst talking in riddles to a half-broken AI trapped inside a Commodore Amiga, it had that same uncanny feeling. All noise and nonsense, but beautiful with it.
That book proper lodged itself in my head so I tried to recreate it a bit in paint. Felt like it was speaking the same language I was trying to paint at the time—turning mess into mood, randomness into something meaningful.
Same as the others in the series, I was working with frottage / grottage, smears, scrapes, just letting the textures lead the way. Seeing what forms crawled out of the noise. Every now and then, something would show itself and I’d think, “...that’s it.” Then I’d pull it back a touch, start chopping bits out, gluing and sticking, adding some sharper edges and cut-up elements to give it more of that fractured, geometric vibe in places.
Looking back now, it does feel a bit like I accidentally collaborated with some half-sentient, glitchy AI from the ‘90s—maybe A.L.I.C.E or Eliza, or even N.I.A.L.L—who got stuck inside a beige wedge Amiga 1200, whispering strange dreams through 2mb RAM, glue, static and pixel dust. As long as it doesn’t try to steal my art and flog it as a Vintage Deluxe Paint