Bacchanalia Beneath the Wind Turbines is the latest piece in my Acid Renaissance series of artwork.
It’s a drawing made in Sanguine pencil (and some white pencil) measuring 760mm × 560mm, and yes, in terms of medium and lighting it’s unlike the previous pieces of artwork in this series. I started work on it several months ago and it has been slowly progressing over all that time.
The drawing came from a disquiet that the series was growing too dark (in both theme and lighting) and divorced from the landscape, and I decided that “Acid Renaissance, Act II” was necessary as a way to both accept and contain the initial work in the series, and also to allow the changes necessary. I’ve written before about the need to re-imagine the future - more specifically, to reimagine a positive future, something to aim for, rather than another dystopian vision of despair - and Acid Renaissance was conceived as just that.
So, with the artwork of “Act I” having set the scene, “Act II” of Acid Renaissance will be the space for my attempt at that: it will be a re-futuring, a re-weirding, a re-enchantment, but these things are not always painless. Which leads me back to the quote from Elvia Wilk that I was mulling over in September:
“If living in a new weird ontology is the only way for people to keep living, what do we want to keep of ourselves?”
Addendum: I have been starting to feel a slight disquiet over the terms re-futuring, re-weirding, re-enchantment. It’s the “re-” prefix: it speaks of going back. We need to go forward, not look backwards.