Then is Now Bad Painting

Then is Now Bad Painting is a series of paintings I describe as Bad Realism. The work is deliberately “bad” not only in its style and execution, but also in what it depicts. The roughness of the paintings reflects the ugliness of the actions they portray. They are bad paintings of a bad world.

The series reimagines historical events and social realities that were once accepted, tolerated or enforced, but which now appear unthinkable within contemporary Western society. The paintings include a woman burned for witchcraft, the November pogroms of 1938, a minstrel show in a community theatre, a man arrested for kissing another man, the persecution of homosexual men under Nazism, and a Nazi citizen militia patrolling Berlin. The scenes are imagined, but the histories behind them are real.

The title points to the unease at the centre of the work: the past does not remain safely in the past. Political ideas, prejudices and forms of violence that appear to have been overcome can return. The distance between then and now can become disturbingly small.

As in my wider Bad Painting series, technical failure is part of the language of the work. Perspective collapses. Bodies are out of proportion. Spaces do not quite make sense. Shadows fall in the wrong direction. I am not interested in correcting these things. The lack of refinement gives me a freedom that more controlled painting does not.

I do not consider the work part of the historical Bad Painting movement, although I have long been attracted to the freedom I find in painters such as Joan Brown and Neil Jenney. For me, painting badly is not a stylistic joke. It is a way of removing restraint and allowing uncomfortable subjects to enter the work directly.

I began Bad Painting in 2013. I have long accepted that the work can divide audiences. Whether it is liked, disliked or rejected is secondary. What matters to me is that the paintings remain able to confront things that are difficult to look at.