Contact: stubbs.jonathan[at]gmail.com
My work touches on the mortal and eternal, finite and infinite, embodying absence, silence, the sublime, solitude and death. It teeters on the edge of illusion; where reality and imagination become hazy, manifesting the physical and the metaphysical; grounded by the earthly, chasing the unearthly.
These considerations were inspired by my investigation into the Romantic Movement and ideals that gripped Europe in the early 19th Century, especially the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Other influences include the writings of the Holy Bible; Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky; and the work of Anselm Kiefer. These impart to my work their handling of significant subjects: notably, an embrace of mystery and the parallel discourse of humanity and eternality.
My dissertation, entitled Re-inventing Romanticism: The Metaphysical Space Within (2007), is a discussion on Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Friedrich, and the reflections of the eternal and mortal therein.
I can roughly divide my current work into two main sections. Between 2007 and 2008, I primarily created paintings with traces of human presence, architecture or artifacts, once glorious, now destroyed, decayed or abandoned: leaving an aching vacuum, a sense of physical isolation and psychological solitude. These become sites where the mortal and eternal can be contemplated: the longevity of the earth and heavens, paralleled with the brevity of human consciousness.
This has culminated in my recent work of 2009: the series MONSTER. This series outlines a myth centred on a snake-like Monster which devours paint or pigment as sustenance. The idea originates in Genesis Chapter 3, v19, “till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” and v14, “on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat.” The myth depicts the creature’s consumption of the painted world surrounding it.
In its wake, it leaves a path of destruction, vegetation and buildings reduced to the raw material from which they were fashioned, paint.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant, a precursor of the Romantics, stated, “the world can only be said to exist as far as we are aware of it”. Likewise, the Monster is bound to its flat universe, its sustenance its own substance.
The myth continues over several images; the Monster’s lair, markings scrawled into the walls; in the stomach, crystallised forms germinating from the murky paint; and Specimen, the creature suspended in the Natural History Museum, London. Each of these captures the painted universe waging war with its destroyer.
For future development of this work, I will trace the ancestry of the Monster and its appearances in the painted world, assembling a portfolio of evidence and specimens, strengthening proof of its existence, blurring distinction between reality and imagination.