MUSHROOM GOTHIC

The drawings of Michael Duffey.

A reoccurring, indeed obsessive feature of my work is the use of the mushroom, particularly it’s dark underside. I use the black corolla of mushroom gills as a personal signature and linear graphic device.

Springing up briefly after a shower of rain, the mushroom is my signifier for decay and the transience of life and the life cycle. It stands in, (in vegetable form) for the scull and crossbones hovering over us all. To this end I bend and shape it, experimenting as I draw, planting, in the heart of my drawings, a memento mori. In some drawings taking on the characteristics of a pathogen, it balloons, mutates, asphyxiates or insinuates itself into places where it shouldn’t be. I like my line to be organic, hypnotic, perhaps even phobic.

As a self taught artist, I have developed a method of free-flowing composition, a process akin to meditation, to relax and wind down into. I prefer to draw alone, getting completely absorbed in the process. Drawings are plenty and frequent, untitled, and mostly freeform, sometimes referring to specific people or events. Ideas are pulled from all directions. Reoccurring themes include ‘suffering in nature’. (Drawing H speaks of the industrialised treatment of cattle) This perhaps takes a more poetic turn in drawing Q where ‘A walking forest with all the creatures in it asks a tree ‘where is the best place to settle’?

Different types, shapes and sizes of ghosts and spectral phenomena also enter my work as possible scenarios for life after death are thought through. Drawing B actually contains three types of ghost!
Extraordinary or everyday events also people my work. (As in drawing U of a mother with a very boisterous toddler and E and N which are portraits of a friend.)

Although my work has been described as somehow ‘Gothic’, my reference point is not art in relation to art movements and art history, but the surfacing, channelling and fashioning of a singular inner vision.

October 2007

For more background information about Mike ... click here to read a short biography.

Mike was recently featured in an issue of Online Arts magazine Silver Lion. To read the article which covers his life, includes many examples of his work and also delves into the deeper psychological roots of his inspirations ... click here




To read Mikes's recent article in online Art magazine Silver Lion
click here



Below is a selection of Mike's work for you to enjoy ... simply click on a thumbnail to see a larger version ... and when you are finished looking at it ... just close the page to return here.


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My name is Michael Derek Duffey. Born in Singapore in the late 1950’s, I left school at 15 after a turbulent ‘army family’ childhood in Singapore, Yemen, and Germany. As a child I experienced widely different cultures, as well as some of the sharper realities of living in a war zone.

Memories of Yemen (then known as Aden) included strange animals and sights, such as a giant manta ray flying out just above the sea, a fierce baboon kept on a long chain, and hundreds of cats, eyes glowing, wailing at night and living in spiny shrub land near the flats. I also observed the life of nomads living in a huge tent-like construction made of oil drums. The flats where we lived were once caught in the middle of a skirmish resulting in clouds of black smoke and upturned vehicles.

Later, moving with my family to Lipstadt, Germany, I and my friend Sigfried would spend whole days scouring for scrap metal to sell on. We also sold and repaired old bicycles found on rubbish dumps.

Back in England, after a stint at naval school on the Arethusa training ship, I took on an itinerant existence, living up and down the country, working through a string of dead end jobs. In a life characterised by physical graft, I have been a soldier, a foundry worker, a metal fabricator, amongst countless other things, and I now work as a school caretaker.

Space for art, for poetry and beauty are eagerly caught wherever and whenever I can. Art is an opportunity for escape from workaday reality into an arena for evasion and self expression where I can expand my horizon indefinitely.

Despite years of drawing I have seldom exhibited. At school, on the Arethusa training ship, I won the ‘Miles Prize’ which set me on the path to art. In 2004 I won the 3rd prize medal in the ‘mixed techniques’ category at ‘l’oeil et la main’ (the eye and hand spring salon annual exhibition, at Bedarieux South of France)

Contact:

Email: tony.anderton@ntlworld.com


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