Today is the day of the great strike when public workers show their displeasure of our glorious leaders' reaction to the economic situation. An inelegant steal from the poor, protect the rich situation. The image of the now unfortunately crazed and forgetful Margaret Thatcher looms large in a certain type of collective memory. Loved by the Right, loathed by the Left, the same image representing and generating feelings of worship or hatred. Quite a feat for a middle aged woman's rather non remarkable features.

Some recent images. A festive cover girl and some increasingly degrading images.

Three terrorists killed by U. A . Vs. They are the types of terrorists known as operatives, masterminds, suspected number ones. Tracked by the C. I. A , they are blown to bits by Hellfire missiles  fired from Predator drones. Quite soon we might well be watching a variety of American series based around the heroic people who who fly the drones from the safety of mainland U. S. A.

Their images are also tracked and sourced from propaganda videos and web sites ; their content forensically scrutinised and stored.

Released to the press the images serve a more familiar function, that of identifying an enemy. Cropped and resized and printed onto cheap newsprint paper they resemble wanted posters of the Old West.

Newspapers usually end up in bins or stacked up in bathrooms or garages. So that is the end of the life cycle of such imagery.

Some of the images I have been tracking. Weather damage does for them eventually as they moulder away in the garden. I am interested in how certain images retain their charisma despite the damage they undergo. And I would not describe them as abject. As objects intended for show I would say they were appropriated and repurposed. It could be said that advertising creates images which can be considered sacred with the models , stars and objects, as powerful sacred icons. The nearest we have to saints. But it has to be said that flogging high end hand bags and perfume through the medium of a distinctive face and moody colouration cannot be easy in the middle of the biggest recession since 1929. Recessions polarise people. Recessions breed fear. Making art in the age of recession is a whole new ball game. And games should be fun. But somehow with the economy dropping into pieces , the regular drip , drip , drip of casualty figures from Afghanistan , and the fact that our government is run by the rich for the rich , takes away the fun. Being iconoclastic seems an option.

In what way can a photograph stand for the equivalent of a painting , or in some ways represent some of its values as an image ? Perhaps it cannot. We have our Friths and our Gurskies. Narrative artists.

Well, I would never get to drape a gallery floor with bacon rind, possibly I would never want to.

A lyrical title: Arabesque , early morning. Plus image.

The two images were found printed on opposite sides of the same page of an expensive glossy fashion and lifestyle magazine. Weather damaged , their gloss has diminished. They retain some of their original allure, but separated by damage from their original context they function as repurposed images , as art.

As art , their purpose is clear. A graphic condemnation of acquisitiveness. The handbag, an attractive image;   a glossy , well lit and digitally enhanced icon of an enhanced lifestyle ,  browsed over by the professionally manicured fingers of the aspirationally challenged , or the aspirationally secure.

As images they look pretty cool. I am interested in how they look, firstly as products of a professional photographer and graphics team team using a sophisticated suite of Macs, and then my own small contribution at the end of the chain.

Two recycled images from a high end fashion monthlly

A quite carefully composed photograph

Murdoch News Mogul

Magazine cover

An image from the archive which seems to fit in with the 11 / 11/ 11 day.  On a day such as November the 11th, one thinks of the war dead. The paintings from World War One barely feature a corpse, one wonders what the official war artists really saw. Henry Tonks came close with his beautifully and delicately crafted drawings of the mutilated faces of Flanders infantry. Ripped Tommies. There are more dead bodies graphically depicted in comics and video games than there is ever recorded in official art. A.K 47s and grinning skulls feature as tattoos or as ironic images (or not ) of immature work.

Cover art.  Cover art images are particularly strident. They have to be. But it is kind of fun to take them down a step or two.  Perhaps ' graphiconoclastic ' is a word which describes my practice.

I can see you ( a possible title )

M.T

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Media Owner

Some images from the archive.

Screwed up Gadaffi

Screwed up Gadaffi

Beckett

Coward

Two of Gadaffi, in one he is closer to death. There is a Beckett and a Coward. Not one of these people live in any meaningful way except through imagery and history; their reputations gradually fading away or being recanonised according to taste and sentiment.

There is a girl in a photograph. It is a photograph of an actor playing Marilyn Monroe. The newsprint image was screwed up and unfolded and the process repeated a couple of times. Of all the shots I took of this image as temporary object , this one seems the most interesting. The creases and folds resemble those in bed sheets.  It's like waking up next to a loved one, with a sense of wonder at the person who is just a few inches away. Kind of out of focus and used up looking.

Spitfire

perfume bottle image

Queen image

Some images taken recently. They are part of a degrading series. I wonder if they will be available five days from today after the weather has done for them ?

rephoto note

rephoto note

These two images were created recently as part of ongoing research. Images are selected for their iconic
power and then screwed up or otherwise degraded. Sometimes they are left to degrade outside where the weather is allowed to further alter the image prior to it being photographed. In some ways this type of work is harder than painting or drawing, one is forced to confront a previously made image and then somehow take it over and make it one's own. Currently I am imagining these images as prints on Somerset paper. I suppose also that the willed destruction of images of luxury is a form of vandalism, or the removal of one level of reality to be replaced with one further away from the original, which is quite  often a posed woman in a studio. This is followed by an appearance in a magazine, the magazine is bought and the image changed in sometimes quite an ad hoc manner and then photographed and represented as an artwork.

A chewed and spat out royal portrait.

Towards images of Prince Charles and George Osbourne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Charlie boy looks kind of regal and painterly which feeds into the semiotics of museum based 

images of royal portraiture. But he does not look arrogant and dense enough for my taste.

George , as an image I am less satisfied with, partly because I could not make him 

look cruel enough, considering what is happening to the economy. He needs to look like Goya's 

portrait of Wellington; a perfect matrix of cruelty, arrogance, entitlement and the butchery of human flesh, rendered in oil paint.

These aircraft are kind of iconic given that they have a heavy press presence. Maybe they represent the current conflicts, Iraq and Afghanistan in the same way the Huey has come to stand for a certain view of America's war in Vietnam.

The Chinook itself has had a patchy history with the U.K armed forces, unreliability issues and the sheer expense of keeping them up to date. However as an image it seems to be a kind of visual shorthand for the British contribution to the war in Afghanistan.

I was looking at some drawings I made a few years ago. They are sourced from 50 's photographs but in fact are highly personal to me. I can't imagine them on a gallery wall although the boy is part of the series  "Where is America, please ?" and that series was shown a few years ago at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and earlier elements shown at Kettle's Yard.http://paulgneale.tumblr.com/

Not sure about the fish pics now after all. There are quite a lot of them. And they all seem to have the same format : man lifts large fish in triumph. The backgrounds are the risky part, the glassy silvery surface is supposed to pick up details of sky and trees and yet also be kind of out of focus and vague in order to highlight the sharpness of the torn paper edges.

The images of aircraft may work better as they relate to a period 50 or so years ago, childhood memories and nostalgia for objects that no longer exist except in museum form. And yet there is this endless recycling of related imagery, both professionally produced and amateur, as well as three dimensional versions , from the feeble and poorly produced to high end working and controllable flying scale models.