Daniel Johnston at the Vegas Gallery
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007Private View: Thursday 15 November 18.00-21.00
Beloved by the likes of Kurt Cobain, David Bowie, Tom Waits, and Harmoine Korine, and regarded by many as the world's greatest living songwriter, Daniel has recorded over ten full length albums, and every musical release has contained examples of his artwork. His art compliments and expands upon the themes which are present in his music. The startling combination of innocence of heart and violence of feeling both grabs the attention of those new to his work, as well as rewarding his devoted and ever-growing international fan base with a further insight into the mind of their reclusive and enigmatic hero. His art shares with his music an arresting rawness and honesty and serves as a visual manifestation of the clash of innocence and experience which occupies Daniel's subconscious: the battle between light and dark is a battle that he has fought for most of his life, and it has seen him periodically hospitalised for bi-polar episodes. However, the devil with whom Daniel Johnston must contend has surely strengthened rather than diminished his creative talents.
The man himself is an oxymoron: the critically celebrated genius who is capable of such devastatingly beautiful music occupies the same body as the fragile man-child, who at the age of 46, still lives at home with his parents, and we witness this duality mostly saliently within his art. Daniel's vibrant, frightening, funny and insightful sketches have been exhibited in countless international galleries and he has become a permanent fixture in 'outsider' art books, which illustrate extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds. John Lennon's artwork has had an important impact of Daniel's paintings. "John Lennon was definitely an influence on my art" says Johnson, "He was one of my favourite artists, and with his cartoons and books, the artwork was really cool. I really like that style". In turn, Daniel has begun to exert his own influence upon a new generation of young artists, as he work gains more and more international recognition.
Daniel works obsessively, producing hallucinatory ink pen and magic marker drawings that draw on the iconography of his childhood; comic books, monster movies, bible stories and immediate connections with his desires and fears. Childhood characters such as Captain America and Casper the Friendly Ghost co-exist alongside his own darker creations, such as the Frog of Innocence, and a character usually meant to represent himself, a man with the top of his skull neatly excised, known as Joe the Boxer. Swastikas are a more disturbing motif, which he attributes only to a fascination with World War II, and occasionally, the work also veers into the pornographic. Comparisons can be drawn between Daniel's work and Angela Carter's dark and twisted take on the Grimms fairytales: the line between innocence and experience begins to blur. It is through Daniel's work that we are able to understand the darker meaning at the heart of our childhood fears and dreams. He reveals our own minds to be the closet from which the monster jumps, and his work is conversely simple yet complex, amusing yet disturbing, and never anything less than deeply affecting and tragically beautiful.
Minivegas, a collective of video-directors, will be showing the animation they made earlier this year for Daniel Johnston's song "True Love Will Find You In The End". This short video used a mixture of techniques like miniature backgrounds and stop motion animation combined with CG characters. All the characters are based on the original drawings by Daniel Johnston. It shows recurring characters like the Devil and Jeremiah The Frog. The video had his premiere at the NFT London at BUG in September .Other videos by Minivegas have been shown worldwide at festivals won many prices and acclaimed various awards like the Bronze and Silver CLIO award. Minivegas was also selected to feature in the 2007 Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase.
James Unsworth, a London based artist who graduated from MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2006, will show one of his newest drawings. Influenced by Daniel Johnston, James' work presents a grotesque and precisely detailed picture of a dark world all of us have visited but are scared to dwell upon let alone talk about, in order to preserve our own sanity. Many of his works are centred on a sexually obsessive honesty that captivates the viewer in its brazen delivery.
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