Delusion and/or Reality...            2023 statement

I enjoy writing about art as well as actually producing it. A while ago I joined some Facebook art appreciation groups, but as time went on I realised that most of the paintings I saw were either entirely produced by AI or merely partly AI. When I use that horrid little acronym, I include paintings done using human controlled software too. It now seems to me as if the computer geeks, nerds and dweebs are intent on fulfilling the century old dada programme concerned with the destruction of art. If you like your art all cybernetic, anonymous with no texture, physicality, romance or reality then you ought to read no further. I suggest that you buy the appropriate software and begin producing genius art yourself straight away with no pain or suffering. It has been forty years since I first took the production of art seriously, previously I studied social sciences at Middlesex Polytechnic. It wasn’t Marx that I objected to then, but the wild misinterpretations of him which were bandied about at every university during the Cold War. There is a form on my coffee table at the moment which I may fill out to join the Liberal Democrats. I don’t think there can be any lasting change in the UK without parliamentary reform. Presently Labour wants to completely exterminate the Tories and the Tories want to decimate labour. So what’s new? Plurality is what’s needed now not facile binary oppositions. Texture is very important to me when I am painting, but this seems to be difficult for the masses to appreciate. I’m afraid I do regard the tastes of the masses as vulgar and uneducated because I am committed to painting; I do not approach it with a mere passing interest. Most of all I resent intensely the media intrusion into my life. I am aware that my paintings aren’t for everyone. They aren’t designed to be. The media rip the paintings out of my Canon Ixus and then chuck the uncropped images to the uneducated proles for ridicule. This has been going on for about twenty five years, since I bought my first digital camera. If you don’t like my work I would prefer you to take no further interest in it. Also I am aware that I am being vidded as I work. Some people find unfinished paintings absolutely hilarious. There are jests in my work it is true. Aficionados would merely grin rather than cracking up in uproarious laughter. But that is the way of this country. Ideas above ones station are strictly verboten and I do see all of this intrusion and piling in as a violation of my human rights. What you may not realise is that as I paint I am a victim of micro- wave torture as well. This is in fact the society of universal torture, I am being made an example of as a fearsome warning to others not to follow in my footsteps.

I am not at all happy in this country. This is mainly due to the micro- wave torture that I have had to put up with for twenty six years at least. Of course the mental health service will never publicly admit to the existence of micro wave torture because they would have to pay out billions to all of the victims of it. But I was partially clued up by an Irish psychiatrist twenty five years ago who called it a “command and control system”. How else do I hear of the foolish scripting of my life by art administrators who are determined to abolish the idea of working class genius? I have heard of more or less all of their plans for me through the voice to skull technology of micro wave torture. Already my paintings have been interfered with in my garage, and I have heard of the plan to allow the public to deface them at a famous gallery. I have heard of the other plans to have me on “Strictly” a programme that I never watch and have absolutely no interest in. I have heard of the plan to have me dress up foolishly like some kind of sad clown and then force me in front of some television cameras. I will never ever appear on the BBC. I am quite a timid kind of person who values privacy. I am not like Russell Brand or Alan Partridge. It would be nice if these functionaries were to communicate with me in a civilised decent way instead of being so cowardly and under handed. Had I been in their shoes I would have done this years ago. I have been successfully isolated by forces beyond my control and I intend to leave the country at the earliest opportunity. I am a torture victim not a celebrity. As to my paintings, I may decide to burn them rather than let them fall into the hands of ignorant barbarians. I have burnt my paintings before, and I quite enjoyed the effect it produced. I feel very depressed about the state of the art scene. What seems to be valued these days is anonymity, smoothness, conservativism, commodification and dullness; these are exactly the opposite values to the ones I esteem. It’s obvious to me that I just do not fit in here anymore, therefore I’m off some place, I will leave the UK in the hands of software developers.      

A Statement of my Thoughts 2022.

I feel that there are people out there who want to know my true beliefs. So at the risk of sounding self- important I will now outline my beliefs regarding life, politics and everything. First comes a little reflection on twentieth century history. I believe that during the expansion of the third reich in the thirties and forties the nazis looted Europe of ALL of it’s wealth including the gold reserves held by  European central banks, This money was not funnelled into the Nazi war effort but was held by the nazi party in preparation for the end of the war which they knew they would lose, after the US. joined the Allies. 

There were many banksters in the higher echelons of the nazi party who exploited all of the stolen assets to further their cause of a nazi dominated world, a fully satanic plan. Look at what they did during the war and the horrors and inhumanity of their “final solution”. Something like that is what they want for the world. I believe the nazi party still exists and it is a fact that it did not surrender at the end of the war, but instead, spread globally.

There are certain things about the modern world, the world created by the nazi party, that I do not like. I believe that the higher nazis in the military industrial complex are a breakaway civilisation. Perhaps they have some psychic connection to aliens, I have an open mind about that, but I do not believe that aliens have ever landed here in nuts and bolts ufos. They have anti- gravity aircraft and they have probably mastered nuclear fusion. The “alien spacecraft” story was spread by the nazi party as cover for their anti- gravity experiments. 

Before he died Werner Von Braun made a series of “predictions”. He said that first there would be “terrorism”, then there would be “environmental catastrophe”, and then there would be an “alien invasion”. All of this for what? To satisfy the blood lust of aliens or humans? It all seems so senseless to me but probably not to racists. I despise people who are consciously racist, but I do not want to inflict any harm on them. I believe that the nazi party is “above” all of the other national political parties of the earth and they can easily pull their strings using the media and the internet. 

Politically I am now a liberal democrat. I believe in decentralisation, multiplicities, grass roots democracy, proportional representation, and a new parliament with many different parties and points of view. The parliament should be round or horseshoe shaped with a decent amount of space between each representative, so that viruses cannot spread as easily and women can bring their babies in.

When I was a student, at Reading University, we were taught that the subconscious mind does not exist. This is because knowledge of the unconscious is now the preserve of the elites in the advertising industry, broadcasting, and in the world of hypnotism. We ignore the subconscious mind at our peril; look at the mess they have made of the world today. If people were more aware of why they act in the way that they do then we could rationally look at the situation and try to create a more peaceful world, without repressive mind- altering technologies.

All of the above influences the way that I paint. I am a “Degenerate Artist”; I use the subconscious as I work to create new and more expressive forms. You have probably noticed that I do not paint conventionally, I haven’t since I first experienced De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko. I do not agree with the current fashion of disrespecting the modern masters. I haven’t been the same since I watched Pollock on video doing his amazing drip paintings. Abstraction is my greatest influence and I am thankful for the education I received on my Foundation Course at Waltham Forest College. 

Statement 2018; by douglas lyell

I have swallowed the red pill, I have chosen the way of pain, and I am further down the rabbit hole than any other artist in England!

My Buddhist paintings are based on some images of the sacred art of Tibet. When I started painting them a magical process occurred and the pictures transformed into self portraits. I put a great deal of thought into my paintings; when I am painting I go into a right brained trance state; the thinking is done beforehand.

I am a UK dissident, because of my defiance of The System and my support of human rights and freedom. My Human rights have been violated grossly by the British State using microwave torture.  Even though my soul has been destroyed by the Headhunters, I am happy. Perhaps this happiness is unreal and ephemeral, synthetic, brittle and artificial. My secret is that happiness does not stem from material things; all property is theft and an encumbrance to the spirit. Nine years ago I moved from Reading England to Porthleven, Cornwall in the extreme south west of Britain. Here I have at last found some peace and my art has flourished as a result. I am a supporter of localism and regional autonomy.

My oil paintings are in the tradition of Auerbach, Kossoff, Bacon and Bomberg, who are in turn in the tradition of Cezanne and Van Gogh. I think of Van Gogh every day. When I was a student I really tried to be like him; he is a kind of Christ figure to me, he achieved the feat of both being high and low. I never forget the story of how some of his paintings were used to mend a chicken coop. Cezanne or his wife threw his paintings out of his window. None of them could sell in their time, though Van Gogh was beginning to attract interest before he committed suicide. Most of the avant garde painters of the turn of the twentieth century couldn’t sell and were regarded with contempt; they were extremely low at that stage only to be deified after a couple of decades. I often ruminate on what Van Gogh would have been like if he had lived on into the twentieth century. How would he have reacted to abstraction? Would he have painted in a non- representational way?

I cogitated a great deal after I moved to Cornwall about what to do artistically. After I graduated from Reading University in 1993, I did work that was almost conceptual, but I had taken the trend of subversion too much to heart, and I later thought of my work then as too literal, and simple minded; I was into art povera at that stage and I wouldn’t do anything that had monetary value or smacked of “richness”. After a spell in mental hospital my ideas changed drastically, and again I contemplated Van Gogh, for whom painting was an absolute inner necessity; I realized that I too had to paint with a humble heart to express my spirit and my soul.

Before then I had the idea of just picking objects from the locale of the show and arranging them in the gallery in a “subversive” manner. I thought that if I could successfully do this, which I did, then it would also be possible for me to use art materials that I have purchased in an improvisational kind of way. I concluded that like Van Gogh, I just had to paint to survive, like the condemned in mental hospital. Of course there are certain hypothetical problems regarding where the materials come from and who manufactures them, but it is not what concerns the inmates of a prison or the tortured souls in mental hospitals; I felt that I had to think in a different way, swallow my pride, forget what I had learned at uni and just be another nutter without high falutin fantastical political theories and intellectual left brained ideas. I came to the conclusion that I could and should express myself in oil paints and return to the values I had when I first started to draw and paint. I love the smell of turpentine, linseed oil and the feel and smell of oil paint; this is what I really want to do, and what I must do.

In Cornwall I at last have the ability to paint en plein air. I live a short walk away from the sea and I can hear an mordros, the sound of the sea from my flat. I couldn’t be better placed anywhere in the UK. I think of my paintings as avant garde, and I am sure that they are; if you think they look old fashioned you will have to tell me what artist has painted like me before. My paintings are original, real and done by a genuine nutter!

Wakefield, Yorkshire, England is my birthplace, I grew up in London. I was educated in sociology at Middlesex University, and in art at Waltham Forest College, Sir John Cass College, Reading University,    and Coventry University, England. I live in Porthleven, Cornwall; this is the thirteeenth year of my presence here. I threw away everything that I had learnt at university concerning restrictive theories, and made a fresh start here in Cornwall. First I painted the sea. This informs my current practice. I have had group shows in New York, Berlin and Rome. email; douglaslyell12@gmail.com , douglaslyell@yahoo.com

Please click on the thumbnails to see them better. Lose yourself in the details.

My paintings are priced at £1000 each. I would be willing to trade one for a computer. If you are interested, please email me at douglaslyell12@gmail.com