“Man is both Angel and Devil, but it is the Devil who can always be trusted, because he never sleeps.”
I had first confirmed the truth of this statement many years ago. I felt its meaning had penetrated deeply and that it had fostered in me a profound respect for the Devil…or more particularly, my own Devil.
It was while rummaging through a portfolio of my drawings produced in the early 1970’s that I came across the image above. The drawing contained many of the characteristics to be found in other pieces of my work of that period, although technically it is certainly not what I would call a ‘good’ drawing. However, it was the questions surrounding the generation of this image that so firmly focussed my attention.
In the first place, I relived the short moment of intense rage that had initiated and then sustained the process of drawing. Alone in my studio, forty years ago, I had given free rein to a violent emotion which resulted in the production of an unspeakably brutal image. The emotionally driven nature of the drawing process and the speed of its execution are clearly evident. Curiously, I was unable to remember the cause of those few brief but incandescent moments in my past. No doubt it was something quite trivial.
But now this image seemed to be entirely unrelated to any recognisable manifestations of my own personal Devil. Clearly this monstrous image had more to do with fear, impotent anger and outright evildoing than anything else. No, it seemed to be much more closely associated with my childhood fantasies when overhearing the grown ups speak of some abominable wartime atrocity or other or perhaps my youthful imaginings of the Minotaur’s progress in the Greek myth. There was also the possibility that I had simply been more deeply impressed than I thought by the well known Minotaur images produced by fellow artist Michael Ayrton that had so intrigued me back in the 60’s.
But I was finding myself becoming more and more entangled in a quite fruitless search for explanations. Moreover, the taste of that experience was beginning to acquire a somewhat familiar flavour.
Even so, I was finding it increasingly difficult to attribute the production of that drawing entirely to a devilish moment of self-forgetfulness in which I had passively surrendered to an overwhelming negative force. On the contrary, I was obliged to realise that certain decisions were being made while violence had been transmitted directly through arm, hand and fingers gripping a 2B graphite pencil.
Inside that episode of spontaneous combustion there had been small fractions of time, perhaps nanoseconds, in which specific physical features had been deliberately selected for emphasis at the expense of others. Some brief flickering moments of intelligence had undoubtedly somehow appeared within a state resembling chaos.
The more I pondered upon this image and its melodramatic moments of creation, the more I marveled at our inward capacity to visualise. Nevertheless it would seem that if not actively employed, that self same faculty can become a plaything readily available to the Devil. The ability to fuel all my dreams and fantasies is placed at his command. But when such an inner state of things is truly acknowledged, I am sometimes able both to recognise and welcome him thankfully as indeed my most trusted friend and helper. Though recognition is surely the problem. I know my Devil to have an infinite variety of disguises. I certainly know him to be capable of adopting the most angelic postures. But for the moment I am grateful to have more than once detected his passing presence during the production of this short piece.
Gerald Larn.