-- Published: Wednesday, 10 May 2017 | Print | Disqus
The art world and artists have in the main not addressed one of the most important issues of our time – central banks foisting debt on the people and nations of the world and thereby controlling them.
An artist who has the knowledge and courage to look at and address the world of money, the dangers of monetary policies today and currency debasement on a scale that the world has never seen before is an Irish artist called Conor Walton.
The Dream of the Central Banker (Click painting to enlarge)
In the words of Conor himself:
“This picture (see above) refers to some of the larger monetary disordersof our time.
That economists occasionally come up with naďve images to represent their ideas has been a boon to cartoonists in the financial papers, and ‘helicopter money’ is surely among the best of them.
I think it’s about time the subject received the fine-art treatment.
This picture celebrates some of the madness of our times, with its ‘heroic’ central bankers and their delusions of control.
It is part of a series of paintings loosely titled ‘Asymmetrical Warfare’.
The Joker Wins Again (Click painting to enlarge)
This phrase sums up my entire career, but it has particular relevance to this current series of works because they deal explicitly with cultural conflict, with the crises of our times – political, ecological, financial, cultural and moral – and the warped perspectives that ensue.
These paintings represent a cultural battlefield. For me, they are a way of waging a small-scale war against modernity.
About twenty years ago, in my late twenties, I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t understand how the world worked: so much of what was going on made very little sense to me, particularly in the spheres of markets and finance.
So I went ‘back to school’ and tried to fill in the gaps in my understanding and overhaul my world-view. I emerged from that overhaul a ‘Doomer’.
Being a ‘Doomer’ is often cast in very negative terms, but I quickly discovered the positive side.
For a start, a couple of well-timed investments through GoldCore made me money. But, more importantly, I found my sense of artistic vocation renewed: my job as a painter is now to show what I think is really going on in the world, to document our times in all their craziness.
My chief accomplices in this enterprise have been my young children. With their aid, and the aid of their toy monsters, action figures, fire-trucks, helicopters, half-deflated balloon-globes and all the other paraphernalia of childhood, I’ve been able to construct in my studio miniature tableaux; dramatic assemblies of figurines and objects that refer, explicitly and symbolically, to the ‘big picture’; the great events of our time.
I then paint these, using all the tricks of pictorial illusionism – composition, perspective, light and colour – to render them as convincingly as possible.
Illusionism still has great artistic potential because reality is still something we find difficult and threatening.
I’ve heard it said that people can avoid facing reality, but they can’t avoid the consequences of not facing reality.
I think my work is very much bound up with these issues; with naturalism at one remove, with fantasy and disillusionment.
In our culture, to an historically unprecedented extent, affluence and industrial might have become weapons in a general war against reality, against nature.
Who’s going to win?”
Conor can be contacted and his art can be looked at Conorwalton.com
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