Mark Sheeky

An idea that came to me on Wednesday 28th April 2010, along with a second about a woman taking off a man’s skin. This is about the feminisation of society and had two influences; the emotional attitude of the main party leaders in the 2010 general election that was being held at the time, and also the film Saw III, which I began to watch on the Tuesday night. The vision was of a man in a dark dank prison cell, stabbed by a dagger or sword and leaning over. A windows shaped like a woman’s profile looked on, and a rose was draped somewhere over the body. The painting was composited digitally. In this instance it was painted in a single layer, in very few earth tones. Almost all of the flesh, and most of the painting itself, is Mars Black, Titanium White, Light Red.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/death-of-man
http://marksheeky.substack.com/p/framing-the-death-of-man
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/death-of-man-again

A painting about the links between the emotions of love and pity as perceived by one party. The ‘mirror’ in one-way because the perception is different from the emotion sent, or perhaps it is; therein lies the conundrum. The mirror here is white-gold.

For an underpainting a colour must be permanent, opaque, fast drying, and it usually helps to be dull in chroma (that is, greyish). For this picture black, white, yellow ochre, light red, and cobalt turquoise were used; testing the colours first in a small size study. The painting features white-gold gilding

Links to making-of blog posts:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/gilding
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/more-transmittance
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/transmittance-77c
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/transmittance_14
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/transmittance_29
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/transmittance_22

A self portrait was needed for a competition and I had many options including a surreal inside out portrait, conceived a few weeks earlier with this in mind. However I had one idea of a portrait from an unusual perspective and considered from below and above. I took some test photographs and the results looked impressive. I tried many poses, some looking down at the camera, others with arms in different ways. By chance my ceiling light was near my grasping hands in one image and I took a few like this. The result looked like an attempt to possess the light. I experimented with cloud shapes, and then added a distant dark ring, which improved the impact of the shape. I was later struck that the image reflected my pursuits of the day as I’d spent the day and the previous few days comprehending god and the nature of information, a consequence of reading Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy. The title was born and the painting made perfect sense, grasping towards something, a god certainly, or ideal, knowledge etc. The black ring had significance beyond the visual impact too, for the same reason, as this was directly related to my thoughts on information being contrast, and more powerful information being more powerful contrast. The idea seemed perfect, and all conceived and made in a few hours of one day.

An idea about feelings of ugliness. The inspiration was the Oscar-winning film by David Lynch. Here we are both The Elephant Man, gazing out of the crudely cut hole in his hood, and an external observer viewing Mr Merrick himself. The frame was an integral part of the painting and was, of course, designed as part of the idea. The frame is wood, affixed with jute.

A painting about the birth of sexuality and its strange fears. The idea started from a need for new pictures and was initially based on a very old sketch in my sketchbook that simply showed
a youthful female figure, viewed from behind looking towards a distant light. The female figure was modelled and drawn. A few days later a horse was modelled, and a unicorn seemed
like a natural addition. As part of learning to paint, I’d painted a copy of Raphael’s ‘Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn’, adding a burning unicorn in the sky in my version. This was perhaps on my mind during the conception of this work.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/tracing-reframing-monsters-of-spring

Developed as my annual Christmas card design, a regular feature in my existence since 2008. Time was short and in late October I was reminded that I had been lax in my Christmassy duties, and proceeded to start work. I began with a dome shape, sketching on my typical note
paper about 8cm square. This included a small nativity, a moon, spires and soon the scene was reminiscent of Tatooine, the fictional desert world from Star Wars. Later the suddenly obvious relationship between Star Wars and the nativity came to mind, but only after I’d envisioned
green skinned alien women and men draped over the scene like something from fantasy art.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/first-alien-christmas
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/alien-christmas
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/framing-chester-nightmare-delivery

A quick painting about the addictive nature of Facebook, inspired when an artist friend left Facebook due to this addiction and I said that I understood why. The painting is integrated
with the frame here. The frame is painted in ‘Facebook blue’ with resin plaster leaking onto the wooden frame, the plaster painted to look like the bone of the painting proper. I was lucky to
exhibit this in the Mall Galleries, and decided to dress ‘as a skeletal Facebook’ for the occasion.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/framing-facebook
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/the-deadly-allure-of-facebook-frame

An idea from early 2010 about mortality and immortality, death and rebirth. We are all candles, our wax burning away relative to our brightness, yet, in some ways, often reborn too, like the phoenix. This is one of a series of pictures that features Phoenixes conceived around
this time. The idea might have been visually inspired by the bird in ‘The Landscape Of Anna Q. Nilsson’, but there was a definite desire to make the bird from white candle wax. The picture was drawn at a time of stress when my computer had a hard drive failure, so the first two days of sketching were done, unusually, from my imagination.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/wax-cataclysm-b77
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/wax-cataclysm-683
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/wax-cataclysm

A painting of irony and fun about the artificial sweetener aspartame, and the various conspiracy theories about it. When composing the painting, I was concerned with the abstract symphonic
elements, a unified theme and focusing on the emotion of the work, which here is sinister yet, pantomime dramatic with irony. I traced the original sketch to paper, then enhanced it, duplicating some shapes and curves to create an effect like in the piano music I improvise, thus it is an example of ‘symphonic painting’; an image which uses a shape-theme which is repeated and altered, like the themes in a work of classical music.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/the-fictitious-secret-history-of
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/painting-aspartame-cock-of-woke
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/dali-dream-glazing-aspartame-studio

Painted for the Derbyshire Open Exhibition in 2008, a regular event that features Derbyshire related paintings. I wanted to paint something specific, and decided to paint the neolithic stone
circle, the nine ladies. Despite the fact that the circle was excitingly threatened by a nearby quarry, I failed to come up with a definite good idea and it was some weeks before I arrived at this one. The key part was that the actual stone circle was visible in the sky, a reflection, or
perhaps more correctly a vision of the circle seen from underneath the surface of a lake, because the picture represents the Celtic Otherworld, a supernatural domain which can be accessed through lakes. The lower half of the picture featured nine female figures of stone in a ring, each weeping in Victorian dress to represent the passing of an era in Britain, and in that respect the picture has an emotional connection to the my Albion painting. This is the a second version of this painting, painted on a slightly larger scale.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/nine-ladies-2
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/nine-ladies
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/nine-ladies-begins
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/nine-ladies-underpainting-done
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/nine-ladies-weeping

A painting inspired by Shakespeare. The lovers meet, love, and collapse in stormy despair in a painting story. The frame is custom made, like many of my works. Here the wooden inner frame is stained in many transparent layers which reflect love hearts.

A representation of an idealised bully, a man eternally filled with anger who manipulates and controls people at all times due to paranoia and fear of attack. This painting was designed from the outset to incorporate a complex frame. The frame has a wood core, then covered with a mix of paper fragments and plaster to create a very hard and tough surface, with a rough stonelike texture. The result was covered with epoxy casting resin, then painted. The frame means that no painting, no print could be like the original.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/framing-frenzy

A painting of the monument The White Nancy in Bollington, Cheshire, the painting is also known as ‘The Bollington Napoleon’. A popular subject for local artists, a lady visited a gallery at which I was exhibiting, asking if we had any paintings of the monument, at which point I volunteered to paint one. When composing, I made the sky dramatic, adding distant fire storm, which evoked two things, a sense of destiny, and a sense of distant war, which was present in the news as France had recently been attacked by Islamic State terrorists. The monument was made to commemorate the Napoleonic wars, and I had the vision of adding the figure and horse of Napoleon from David’s painting, charging towards that distant point, filled with gusto.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
http://marksheeky.substack.com/p/painting-thoughts-resurrection-of

An idea originally named Ecephalitis Lethargica, the idea began as a study of sleep. I changed the title when reminded of a girl in my class at my infant school, always asleep due to a troubled family life. The teachers would let her sleep. During sketching I added many more
elements from Dorothea Tanning, an artist flavoured with childhood reflections.

Links to blog posts which reference this painting:
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/she-was-always-asleep-at-school
https://marksheeky.substack.com/p/asleep-frame-congleton-events