spiltteeth
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Location | NY |
| Introduction | Jonathan McCormack is a self-taught NY artist specializing in pen and ink works on paper. His art reflects his Orthodox Christian conversion, background in psychology, and his own personal struggles with mental illness and addiction. His early life was colored by heavy drug addiction and alcoholism which led to several suicide attempts. After a year's incarceration in prison and twice being institutionalized in mental wards, he turned his life around in 2003 and has been sober ever since. Going on to college he graduated with a substance abuse counseling certificate. He locates his artistic inspiration in the works of Alfred Kubin, James Ensor, Max Beckmann, poetry of T.S. Eliot, and others Although still haunted by past traumas, today he pursues his passion for God, art, philosophy, theology, and political activism in Putnam county, NY. |
| Interests | Within us several principles compete for the throne of our hearts. They are at war. They are the hidden forces, motives, and energy generated by the friction of our Being grounded in desire and conflict. I give form to this discord. White paper, black ink, and a sketch pen are all I use to strip down human experience to its barest, truest expression. When I draw I push myself to an emotional crisis. Beforehand I comb medeivil woodcuts, psychological and religious literature, and other sourses to discover the idea-forms that are struggleing to make themselves known. While in a semi-trance state images arise organically from a place of primal upheavel, where the creratures that move us are born, which I then grow, guide, shape and finally trap in a final embodied composition. Each drawing articulates a symbolic narrative involving expressionistic figures enacting themes of existential loneliness, thwarted love, sexual frustration, spiritual longing, abandonment, guilt, despair and the hope of reconciliation. My art is my confession to God; a voice for the phantum tramas secreted in the savage underworld of my soul. It is the violent space where I wrestle with God (not against him) for meaning and life. |
| Favorite movies | Tarkovsky, Lynch, Guy Madden, Lars van Triers |
| Favorite music | Mahler |
| Favorite books | Eugene O’Neil, William Burroughs, Conrad, Camus, Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Shakespeare, John Berryman, Baudelaire, TS Eliot, Kierkegaard, Zizek, Lacan, St. Paul |