Nic Plowman

MAGIC Sex Death

magic |ˈmajik| – sex |seks| – death |deθ|

This body of work is an analysis of the self, myself.

The title for this show was stolen from a documentary on Pablo Picasso. It put forward the notion that magic, sex and death are the great themes of life and thus, the great themes in (Picasso’s) art. This exhibition is about my life, my great themes. It is a combination of self-therapy and diagnosis and continues from the mortality works of late last year, which began with the concept of the death of immortality. The work discusses a personal meditation on life in an attempt to describe the experience through painting in order to infect others by my existence.

The Poe and Bacon paintings are a side-glance from my work on self-therapy; they focus on the darker side of human nature, the creative mind and the narrow valley between genius and insanity.

The Kahlo works are an ode to the vigilant pursuit of self-expression despite the fundamental realities of one’s physical-health. A gift of lessons in self-therapy.

In a bid to definitively describe this state of mind, my vision is an amalgam of abstraction and representation, a play between what is imagined and dreamt versus what is real and exists.

‘Art: the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ Edgar Allan Poe