andrewjonesart

While my works may seem fantastical, in the sense that they superficially appear to portray the unreal, I do not consider them as such. On the contrary – I seek to make visible the horror that, mercifully, eludes the perception of the healthy and well-adjusted. There are real things at the periphery, beyond the horizon, briefly visible at the moment of awakening, in awkward silences, in failure and despondency: the inevitability of decay and death, the folly of hope, the futility of struggle against chaos.

I create icons for absent gods; nativities for failed messiahs; reliquaries for worthless bits of bone. Saint Anthony is torn apart by his demons; the Crucified rots.

As a child, I was inspired by images of the Cyclops devouring the crew of Odysseus, of Gawain beheading the Green Knight, and then of religious martyrs broken, burned, flayed; the eyeballs of saints on platters.

A febrile mix of fantasy, horror, science fiction and comics further twisted my imagination, and Bosch, Caravaggio, Titian, van Eyck and others expanded and refined my aesthetic development.