‘Life begins on the other side of despair.’ ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
My visual art has always leaned towards the sublime and formalist – be it Romanticism’s imaginative relationship with nature, Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious (notable in Abstract Expressionism), Kandinsky’s notion of the spiritual in art or Eastern philosophical musings about connectedness. Such themes continue to inform my work but, somewhere along the line, I began writing and despair towards the absurdity of it all just poured out – often with the mouth of a sailor! I think I get that from my father who was a builder, for they tend to have a similar command of the King’s English. I decided to harness such disillusioned anger and channel it through the above pseudonym, Percival Alexander, which culminated in my first novel, Adrift in Amnesia, and book of poetry, The Cycle Diaries (samples below – I expand on the literary influences behind each book in the introductions). Other pieces come in the form of short stories, blogs, poems, prose and paintings. I am currently writing my second novel – a fairy tale adventure about two lovable cats in search of a new home – and may share some posts of its development later in the year.
adrift in amnesia (extracts of chapters 1–4)
adrift in amnesia: introduction to a daydreamer
adrift in amnesia, chapter one – aurea spiralis
(click here to view a ten-part reading of chapter one recorded on Dartmoor)
adrift in amnesia, chapter two – chelmswood
adrift in amnesia, chapter three – reading, 1991
adrift in amnesia, chapter four – breakdown
paperback and Kindle editions available to purchase here.
the cycle diaries (extracts)
paperback edition available to purchase here.
teleport me off this rock (short stories, 2023)
Inspired by an absurd and dreadful world.
toast to the end (despairing friend)
there is no future! (poems and prose, 2013-2026)
Spanning the interminable, zombie-consumerist nihilism of 21c’s ecocide, forever wars, financial crash, austerity, iPhones, social media, populism, woke, covid, podcasts, influencers, AI slop and whatever banal, god-awful era we’re in now… has it ever been good? Will it ever be?
brief ode to the new forever times
the art of palatable illusions
an unhinged world (longer reads, 2021-2022)
Written during the mass psychosis that was covid and lockdown – what a stupid time to be alive.
post-resistance era: death of freedom
finding rays of light in eternal melancholy (longer reads, 2019-2021)
Remaining young at heart while learning from cats.
remembering an unlikely teacher
opening the floodgates of utter despair (poetry on plasterboard, 2009-2011)
Marking the transition of my work from primarily painting to centring on poetry, fiction and the interrelationship between the eye and the written word, which drew from a variety of sources ranging from conspiracy theories and the 2008 financial crash to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and the prose poems of Oscar Wilde.