Each line of this work is a memory , each figure a simple contrapposto standing in for something or someone I loved with all of my heart that isn’t here any more. Every composition is an aggregate prayer to a thing disbelieved: that I can transport the viewer into this world of broken things and make them see it the way I do, inert, still, perfectly at rest. The full flowering and decay of the collective human unconscious in all it’s useless and former glory, how ridiculous is it? How ridiculous are we? Here at the dawn of the 21st century, when all of the things that were to transform us have become our prison, we are useless and deadly. Who will make statues of us when we are gone? 

These drawings are water soluble; it is the act of signing my name over and over again with something that can be spat on and washed away. The binary quality of pen and ink, of black and white, is simple, but the hatching and shading can be as complex as time, imagination and effort allow. The visual, two-dimensional history of Art becomes pastiche, scrawling ersatz cartoons on the lovingly (but not faithfully) rendered walls of the Parthenon or the ruins of Roman Africa. Using the influences of the visual language and technique of modern comics, 16th century Flemish allegorical drawings, and the forced, flattened perspective of 18th century japanese painting in an attempt to form an emotional narrative partially obscured, almost submerged by the baroque excess of it’s own over-rendering.

The goal of this body of work is to move the viewer, even at the risk of creating kitsch, to feel something for these three sad, allegorical symbols,  remnants of a world long gone who have become self-aware and are taking the best of themselves home to die. Growing out of failed relationships and grief and the monstrous realization of a life conducted unconsciously, being driven by that which was reactive and buried within the collapsed memories of childhood. Each stroke of the pen is an excavation of a memory and an attempt to re-render the perceived grievances of the past into something as lovely as I am capable of making it. It is an apology to all of those I have hurt and an offer of forgiveness to all who have hurt me.

-Tom Bolger 2012