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Purpose - Life in Pictures
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6th
September 05 |
Editor's note:
From time to time we like to bring reviews of projects with a 2000AD link that
might have passed under your radar. With that in mind, we bring you...
Swimini Purpose
- Life in Pictures
By Brendan
McCarthy What
to Expect: A collection of 30 years worth of work from one of the UK's most
original artists.
Review by Richard
Elson
Boy, can this guy
draw. I mean really, really draw. Like he was born just to do that. Like in our
finest moments we can only dream of doing.
As we wander through
this beautiful, pitiful life slowly suffocating beneath the weight of our own
indifference, McCarthy sees beyond. He inhales the essence of experience and when
he exhales, his breath is tinged with fire. Dear people, we are in the envious
position of being witness to a body of work that is without equal. Nobody, anywhere,
not now, not ever, does it quite like Brendan McCarthy.
Every page of Swimini
Purpose, McCarthy's recently released illustrated biography, is a surrealist sermon.
There is a suggestion of a career overview in the way the book is structured,
but Swimini Purpose is about more than just chronology, the precious secrets of
existence peer out at you from the light flecked eyes of these drawings. McCarthy
delivers the tactile texture of the half dream. A hidden world between here and
there, now and then. A world poised, half glimpsed, between sleep and waking.
McCarthy is one
of (at most) a handful of people of genuine vision to have passed through the
sphere of comics in the past fifty years. Whilst it is unfortunate that our own
medium could not contain him for long, we should not feel too bitter, it is clear
from his meandering career that no other medium could. And his more recent TV,
video and film work has yet to deliver an undiluted McCarthy masterpiece to equal
his comics career highs: Strange Days, Paradax and Rogan Gosh. Still, his continued
productivity in TV and cinema can only lead us to hope that eventually some insightful
producer will have the courage to give McCarthy the opportunity to unleash his
powerful vision, unfettered. I can only assume that a worldwide epiphany will
ensue.
Frustratingly,
too many of the fascinating projects presented in the pages of Swimini Purpose
have never reached our screens or comic book shelves and McCarthy is never scared
to show us his failures. Like all great artists, he knows that if he is to reach
the peaks he needs to have no fear of falling from a great height. I should imagine
that there was a lot of personal sacrifice and pain behind the attainment of such
rarefied heights of creativity. Little of that is alluded to in the intermittent
text pieces that McCarthy supplies to illuminate the work on show. Informative
though these authorial interludes are, they are kept to a minimum. The art is
allowed as much room as it needs to speak directly to its audience. And when it
speaks, it whispers a wicked, fairy-tale promise.
We all have moments
in life: vivid, electric moments of unusual clarity. Times when the world is talking
directly to us and, for a fleeting moment, we understand it. They are the stuff
that our sweetest memories are made of. These moments of peak experience may be
few and far between in reality, but I promise that you will encounter more than
a few of them within the pages of this great book. With scant respect for any
existing deities McCarthy has reconstructed the world in his own image. A relentlessly
improbable world. A place where the questions are so interesting that answers
seem distant and irrelevant.
A word of warning:
McCarthy's work is so overwhelmingly bloody good that it has the unintended side
effect of making the viewer feel deeply inadequate. Having said that, if you can
tear yourself away from the miraculous visions within its pages, your everyday
life will be a richer experience for having undergone a tour of McCarthy's world.
We are made of the stuff of stars and he never lets us forget it. And although
we are all made of the same stuff, we are all unique. Brendan just happens to
be a little more unique than the rest of us. At
present, there are only 500 copies of Swimini purpose out there. Do your soul
a favour and get one of them. This is as near as most of us will ever come to
seeing the world through the eyes of a genius. Thank you, sir.
The wonder. The
wonder.
For
more on Swimini Purpose, visit the official
site. |
