Kevin Lycett West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
I mostly paint, draw and print. While usually figurative my subjects are rarely quite human. I'm also interested in landscape that bears the oft-troubling traces of human presence. These are dark times. I feel perpetually shocked that we have ended up here. I try to explore this in my work. I committed to making art seriously late in life. Late enough to do it frivolously.
The pressures on us, as humans trying to live a good life, is enormous. The strains, internal and external, are immense. We are not good yet we aren't bad. We buckle and warp, and learn deeply uncomfortable lessons about ourselves and others. In the mistranslated phrase that Gramsci never quite wrote, but that has become a trope for our times; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” I’m keen, however, to acknowledge that we are much better at seeing the monster in others than in ourselves. We so often find ourselves in a hall of mirrors, endlessly screaming and pointing at scary monsters - that turn out to be reflections of ourselves. The hucksters got our dime again. There' s another thing lurking in this crisis of capitalism that is consuming us and the world. What happens when you throw out the baby of irrationality with the bathwater? The world is far deeper, darker and stranger than our minds can comprehend - or science can explain. The hubris of the enlightenment has served us up an dish of terrible corrosion. Reeking of hate this pandemic cannot be dealt with by simply ramping up on the reasoned arguments. We made this mess. Maybe we need to step outside our world to resolve it. Oh, and I love doing botanical drawings and watercolours. So not all grim then eh?
