percival alexander

‘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 the anger 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 impotent rage and channel it which culminated in my first novel, Adrift in Amnesia, and book of poetry, The Cycle Diaries (samples below). Other pieces take the form of short stories, poems and sweary, bloggy diatribes (taking literary cues less from the lofty ideals of Romanticism and more from the DIY ethos of punk and hip-hop alongside anti-establishment comedians like Bill Hicks and George Carlin), which evolved largely from the paintings on plasterboard that I have also shared here (although not the swearier stuff!). Among other things, I’ve become interested in exploring notions of authenticity – if such a thing is even possible – in an era of digital colonialism (I can’t think of a more striking example of the ‘they-self’ than social media!). It would appear to be the kind of empty, meaningless suffering Nietzsche wrote about that lies at the heart of our current existential malaise: apparently an age of plenty, where our lives have never been made so comfortable by technology, there seems to be no end of despair! Emptiness is a curious subject of extremes, and I wonder which is more authentic: a crisis of meaning expressed in the aforementioned, or is it a beautiful enigma observed by ancient Eastern mystics?

adrift in amnesia (extracts of chapters 1–4)

adrift in amnesia: introduction to a daydreamer

adrift in amnesia, chapter one – aurea spiralis

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)

introduction

canto i

canto iv

canto xi