Black dog and the lighthouse, 2014
The black dog and the lighthouse
Then too you cannot spend an hour alone;
No company's more hateful than your own
You dodge and give yourself the slip; you seek
In bed or in your cups from care to sneak:
In vain: the black dog follows you, and hangs
Close on your flying skirts with hungry fangs.
~ Horace, ‘Satire 2.5’, The Satires, Epistles and Art of Poetry, c33-35BC
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Dear Friends,
This is an exhibition about depression, but don’t worry it’s also about resilience. I wasn’t depressed when I made this work and I haven’t stopped creating since my last solo exhibition, Two Crosses, 2008. I don’t think I’ve been “truly” depressed, but it’s hard to tell sometimes... depression has many grades.
There are reasons why there has been a large gap since the Two Crosses exhibition – the emotional fall out of having a solo exhibition, lack of worth, nothing to say, the Internet, feeling burnt out, financial issues, cynicism, loneliness, lack of confidence, self-doubt, feeling lost… etc.
Not to mention the recession that came after 2008: economic depression is depressing. Cuts to arts funding have been deep and have affected many friends and contemporaries. Six years later we are officially out of the recession but things are no better and I feel we are living in dark times. Unhappiness, struggle, injustice, violence and media manipulation in a never ending loop.
When things are bad it’s hard to be alone. Working as an artist I have worked alone for hours, days, weeks and years. Not talking to anyone for a whole days ends up taking its toll. However solitude has been necessary for me to create the work I feel proud of. It is only recently that I’ve been finding solitude more difficult and counterproductive. I’m not sure individualism is the way forward.
Maintaining motivation and confidence to produce art isn’t easy. Between 2008-11 I didn’t want to paint or draw. This was a difficult period, an emotional outlet had been turned off and I engaged with other mediums such as music and animation to work through that period. I also began to collaborate with others and found that very helpful (See Flawedcore Reocrds).
This exhibition is a broken and scattered narrative; scenes from an unmade film chopped up and rearranged by a chimp. Some paintings are single moments of a half-imagined story, others are fragments of social commentary. The rest are simply abstract thoughts relating to something personal or domestic. There are reoccurring themes and iconography, such as campfires, lizards, parenthood, fear, love, death, sadness and nature. This work is the result of feeling good about putting paint onto paper again.
Some imagery has been borrowed, some have been stolen from my mind. You steal when you are in need, and you get only what is available to you. When you are recovering restriction can be healthy.
I’ll finish with a note that I wrote to myself when I began to paint again: “The forest knows where you are, and that is all that matters”.
I hope this message finds you warm, safe, content and resilient.
Love,
Daryl Waller. Oct 2014
Posters to promote the exhibition via social media.
Evasive version:
Man is a loser, born lazy and depressed with no control over anything but his limbs. Frustrated and alone, trapped in his own mind, a dull, damp place. He yearns to make life interesting. He wants control. He has something to prove yet he was designed to remain hunched in a cave protecting his paunch. He spends hours, days and weeks saving up his energy, pulling fat from his belly, waiting for the grey drizzle and fog to clear so that he may pick some berries, dig for roots… or to kill… again.
A black dog sleeps on his cave floor, well-fed, half sleeping. Disgusted with his own laziness the man lashes out at the dog “false hound, false friend!” he spits. He misses his target and falls on his arse. The man feels guilty about his own idleness, angry that he cannot control the weather or the black dog. He tries to do something, anything.
He draws on the walls of his cave and the dried skins of the animals he has murdered. He builds stupid structures with bright lights on top and points at them, a grin upon his face, but it’s not what one could call an expression of empathy… not yet, he still has a long way to go. He’s using the structure to selfishly search in the dark for meaning. He’s not yet realised it’s better suited as an instrument of altruism. He realises some of these actions ease something inside him; later he defines those feelings and gives them names.
With his newfound activities he discovers he can make people laugh, cry, stroke their chins and scratch their heads in awe and confusion. Finally, real control! Now he has something to do while he waits to die… between the eating, sleeping, copulating, staring into space and endless rubbish. Something still isn’t right though. He still feels numb. The black dog continues to eye the man from the fireplace, blocking the heat… blocking real feelings.
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Man is a loser, born lazy and depressed with no control over anything but his limbs. Frustrated and alone, trapped in his own mind, a dull, damp place. He yearns to make life interesting. He wants control. He has something to prove yet he was designed to remain hunched in a cave protecting his paunch. He spends hours, days and weeks saving up his energy, pulling fat from his belly, waiting for the grey drizzle and fog to clear so that he may pick some berries, dig for roots… or to kill… again.
A black dog sleeps on his cave floor, well-fed, half sleeping. Disgusted with his own laziness the man lashes out at the dog “false hound, false friend!” he spits. He misses his target and falls on his arse. The man feels guilty about his own idleness, angry that he cannot control the weather or the black dog. He tries to do something, anything.
He draws on the walls of his cave and the dried skins of the animals he has murdered. He builds stupid structures with bright lights on top and points at them, a grin upon his face, but it’s not what one could call an expression of empathy… not yet, he still has a long way to go. He’s using the structure to selfishly search in the dark for meaning. He’s not yet realised it’s better suited as an instrument of altruism. He realises some of these actions ease something inside him; later he defines those feelings and gives them names.
With his newfound activities he discovers he can make people laugh, cry, stroke their chins and scratch their heads in awe and confusion. Finally, real control! Now he has something to do while he waits to die… between the eating, sleeping, copulating, staring into space and endless rubbish. Something still isn’t right though. He still feels numb. The black dog continues to eye the man from the fireplace, blocking the heat… blocking real feelings.
