‘Not With A Bang, But A Whimper’ is my etching depicting the collective subconscious event of the apocalypse or the end of days. Referencing one of my favourite poems ‘The Wasteland’ by T. S. Elliot: ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’. The four horsemen of the apocalypse ride on their dead horses igniting a scene of horror and chaos. A Hieronymus Boschian hellish landscape.

In the foreground a lake of writhing bodies in agony from Dante’s Inferno is peppered with upper class oblivious characters unaware of the bodies their pleasure boats ride over. At the end of the river in ‘The Heart of Darkness’ and Apocalypse Now, an insane cannibal tribe stands at an ancient temple gateway to a tormented city of the damned. The city a cross between the neon soaked advertising hell of ‘Blade Runner’, the dystopian nightmare of ‘Children of Men’ and the epic decadence and decay of the Fall of Rome, is filled with naked bodies each contemplating their own destruction and acting in various ways. From bodies laying down in despair, to rape, war, violence, religious extremism, tribalism, and unleashed hedonism.

A demented naked Pope site of a throne in ruins as the city burns around him. Classical beauty in the form of sculptures lay destroyed with anarchic graffiti. An evacuating helicopter, US embassy during the Vietnam War style, attempts to leave the city but is over run with bodies clinging to it and falls back to the ground. And yet for all the collective sound and fury the city shouts out, the final note echoing into the void is a whimper. Moaned by an idiot, signifying nothing.

‘Microbes and Muck’ my etching print quoting one of my favourite thinkers Carl Sagan in ‘Cosmos’ 1980: ‘We’re Johnny-come-latelys; we live in the cosmic boondocks; we emerged from microbes and muck; apes are our cousins; our thoughts are not entirely our own, and on top of that we are making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.’ The artwork is both macro: as a complex city on many islands in a harbour seen from space and micro: a frenzied organism in a Petri dish under a microscope.