Acid Renaissance - June 2025 update

As I try to pull myself out of my current bout of artistic block and resume work on my Acid Renaissance series, I think it’s worthwhile—if only for myself!—trying to put together a new explanation of what I’m trying to do with this series of artwork.

This will be the forty-ninth blog post of mine that is tagged as Acid Renaissance, so it’s not like I’ve not discussed my thinking behind this series before, but as I’ve worked on this project over the course of the past six years my ideas about it have evolved and I wanted to record where my thoughts are now.

My initial idea, posted here in late 2018, just a few months before I created the first piece in the series, was fairly simple:

And so in the new series of artwork I’m planning, following on from England’s Dark Dreaming, I need to explore radical future(s) for England, to imagine promised lands and the turbulent journeys needed to get there from where we are now.

This sentence is still a concise overview of what I’m doing with the series, but it’s obviously very high-level. I want to dig into the strands of the series as they have emerged and evolved.

One thing that has emerged in the creation of the artwork so far is a simple division between two main blocks of work: photographic work and drawing (putting aside one linoprint and an early short video).

The photographs have started to form what can best be described as a major arcana of the Acid Renaissance, a metaphorical set of cards to start divining alternative futures.

Initially the photographic pieces only depicted solitary figures, but as the series evolved some of the later photographic pieces depicted multiple figures.

Additionally, some of the later photographic pieces (Transformation Arc and The Bride of the Sun) emerged as triptychs with an implied narrative between the three respective pieces, short stories within a much larger story rather than three depictions of the same figure.

The drawings, on the other hand, are less simply labelled:

• The Children of Winter (drawing) is a drawing in the style of my England’s Dark Dreaming series, initially done as an exploration of whether my drawing style/format from that previous series of work should carry over to Acid Renaissance (I decided it shouldn’t, but I liked having one early piece in the series in that style as a reference link back to it, because Acid Renaissance was always meant as a follow-on from England’s Dark Dreaming);
• Bacchanalia beneath the Wind Turbines starts to imagine a fantastical future Albion, free from drudgery;
• The six charcoal Osis drawings, starting with The City of Osis, are a dark labyrinth of the mind that must be navigated before the future can be imagined;
• The Oracle of Delphi and The Sexton in the Necropolis probably bear more similarities to the photographic work, but the latter piece depicts a figure far more in context of place;
• Sketch for “The Lotus Eaters” and IV. Death by Water represent traps that we can easily fall into;
• Lamentation, Votive, and Untitled are more struggles along the way (and might well have been photographic pieces, but we were in Covid lockdown at the time and so I had to work from reference photographs that I paid out-of-work life models to provide, and this changed their fundamental properties);
• The studies of figures in the Court of Queen Mab (one, two, three - and there’s a fourth one of Queen Mab herself that I still haven’t completed) are obviously linked to the two later photographic studies of figures in the Court of Queen Mab (four and five) and so finally I’ve started to weave the two threads of photography and drawing together (The Duellist (1) and The Duellist (2) also tie in with these, but that’s a thread a need to make clearer in some future artwork).

Trying to hold together all the growing number of labyrinthine threads of Acid Renaissance is starting to feel like a weight on me, but I know it can be—and from a personal perspective, must be—completed. But I still have to feel my way to the conclusion.