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MAGAZINE
ARTICLE
Nick Blinko:
The Devil is in the Detail
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Tony Thorne interviews
an artist/ writer/musician who finds himself being overwhelmed
with his obsession. 'The religious and the macabre are a big part
of my personality,' Nick Blinko said, adding wryly '...there wouldn't
be much left without them.' Not all the faces in Blinko's fantastically
intricate confrontations with his own demons are malignant: among
the skulls, imps, fractured dolls, leather-clad foetuses, oranges
that might be little suns (- branded with the cross), idols, mushroom-beings,
phalluses...there are ironic faces, mischievous things. There
is more than a hint of humour in Blinko's conversation, too. He
is affable and articulate and responds politely to the questions
from the interviewer, but when the tapes of the conversations
(two of them, almost a year apart) are re-played, two things are
evident.
He is holding back.
The 35 year-old talks readily enough of producing pictures all
his life, from the coats-of-arms he designed for his dolls through
the 'Tudor Asylum drawn in white ink on black paper when he was
nine or ten, and his copies of Nicholas Hilliard's Elizabethan
miniatures one year later, to the wholly original masterworks
dating from the mid -1980s which came about after months of working
four to eight hours a day, sitting
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cross-legged on a bed in a state of hypnotic concentrated melancholia
(his parents coming and going; 'Oh Look, he's done another inch!'),
astonished at his own virtuosity; 'I got into it as a viewer as
well as a producer. As the paper fills up, you, the artist, are
intrigued.' Sitting for days on end, balancing the drawing board
across his knees, using the finest of pens, obsessively conjuring
the most intricate, unedited patterns into existence, he thought
at times that, like Bodhidharma the founder of Zen, his legs would
just wither away beneath him. He admits suicide attempts.The first
at the age of eighteen; 'There were triggers. I was reading Diane
Arbus' autobiography and I was reading Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley's
Doors of Perception at the same time - alternately, one sentence
from each.' And again at twenty-six ; '... an immense frustration
with the art drove me to it. I couldn't get my concentration. I
planned to hire a place in London and have an exhibition of my pictures
to explain why I was taking my life.' In fact an exhibition at the
National Schizophrenia Fellowship in 1994 first brought his art
to public attention; he is now represented in the Collection de
l'Art Brut in Lausanne. |
He reminisces about the periods
spent in institutions, where the jokes are all about chemicals and the
characters in the anecdotes are the patients (he remembers a girl with
the same name as his - Nicky Blinko - and a group of inmates who started
their own mushroom-worshipping religion) bouncing their inspired craziness
off their foils, the straight-men, therapists and doctors. He was lucky
that his own doctor was sympathetic and had developed an interest in
experimental psychology, particularly the primal therapy that allows
the patient to regress to confront his traumas in a near-embryonic stage
of existence, to re-birth. The more orthodox treatments, though, left
Blinko with a painful paradox: if he submits to medication, his concentration
goes, his brain and hand and eye cannot work in concert; the side effects
of fuzzed vision, shaking hands frustrate him. But the productive times
without the drugs mean exposure to the full force of psychic torment
and delusions; 'When I got ill, I started to plant paintings in my garden
to see if they would grow.'
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His fantasy persona
came to possess him, a being associated with his humdrum hometown
just outside London where he still lives; 'Samuel Palmer...he
had Shoreham, Stanley Spencer had Cookham, and I'm lumbered with
Abbots Langley... It was the birthplace of the only English pope,
Pope Adrian, Nicholas Brakspear. I was so horrified by religious
wars, when I was deluded, I had a fixation that all those people
had died for me, so that I would be raised to the status of Pope
and I'd construct a new Vatican in Abbots Langley.' After spending
periods in the institution where Louis Wain had once been detained,
the authorities diagnostic label of 'schizo-affective' was amended
to 'thought disorder' - a reprieve from hospitalisation.
What feelings - emotions
- underpin his voodoo iconography and his fanatical attention
to detail? Is there a message in his work directed at anyone other
than himself, and if so, what is it? Does he ever - consciously
or unconsciously - censor his own creations? To these direct inquiries
his replies were non-committal; 'There are some things that would
upset certain people...' was all he would say....
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