Fear and Loathing, Anger and Urgency

Thanks for showing up — or, you know, for stumbling into this chaos of a blog for the first time.

You’ve picked a hell of a situation.

THE BUNKER. 2025. gouache, acrylic, graphite and ink on Arches paper. 22.5 x 30 inches.

I thought I was done with “political art.” Using my work to throw punches at the political landscape started to feel too easy. Like screaming into the void — an exercise in shouting at a wall and calling it progress. It became inarticulate. Meaningless. Neither good politics nor good art. For me, art has always been about something deeper: capturing the raw, the personal. The experience. The feeling. Not the issue. Be the thing, not about the thing.

But like everyone else, I’m suffocating under the weight of collective panic, growing dread, boiling rage — alternating with pure helplessness as I watch everything crumble. It’s a toxic mix, that feeling. Like Hunter S. Thompson once said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." And right now? The weirdness is all-consuming, the fear so suffocating it feels like it's eating me alive from the inside out. It’s like the slow burn of fear and loathing, where each moment is a swirling vortex of anxiety and madness that pushes me toward something—anything—that will make sense of the madness. That feeling became too loud to ignore. It was like a tidal wave pushing me toward The Bunker.

This painting? It’s a dive into isolation. It’s not a home; it’s a cage. Frozen in time, it fuses an American 70s living room with a German 30s color scheme — a perfect storm of false comfort and looming terror. The sunken conversation pit, with its garish red carpet and wraparound couch? It’s not cozy. It’s a trap. The red carpet isn’t some quaint retro detail; it’s a wound. Aggressive. Violent. The only color in the room. It’s a 3-D Nazi flag: red floor, white coffee table, black lily. And that black lily on the coffee table? That fragile, delicate bloom isn’t just a flower — it’s a mutated thing. A shape-shifting nightmare. You think it’s just a lily, but look again. It morphs, just a little, into something far darker. A swastika, perhaps, curled around the blackness — an emblem of death. Or an Alien pod flower giving birth to a fucking monster. That thing on the table is the rot we try to ignore, the festering, blackened seed of violence and control. It’s the symbol of the darkness we can’t escape, no matter how much we try to look away.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) by Katsushika Hokusai

In the left window, a monstrous wave — ripped straight from Hokusai’s iconic work — threatens a paint-by-numbers version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. The raft? It’s square, just like the conversation pit. A brutal, unsettling metaphor for how we’re all crammed into this sinking ship, pretending we’re safe while the storm closes in. We can keep pretending it’s not happening, but the system has already set this nightmare in motion. We’re all trapped. The wave, the raft, the storm — it’s the stark, ugly reality that no one is safe from the forces rising up, threatening to swallow us whole.

And that pit? It’s the mental trap we all retreat into when the world outside gets too unbearable. It’s where we isolate ourselves, pretending that if we stay inside, we won’t feel the heat of the chaos building outside. But the truth is, the more we try to hide, the deeper we sink into madness. It’s not safety. It’s denial. And it’s killing us.

The relationship between the interior and exterior of the painting isn’t just aesthetic. It’s a metaphor for how we’ve been conditioned to look away. We’ve built our lives around a thin veneer of comfort, pretending we’re safe in our little bubbles. But the moment you stop and really look — when you face the ugliness clawing at the door — there’s no denying it. The outside is painted with violence, chaos, and tragedy. There’s no hiding from it anymore.

As an artist, I’ve always avoided making political statements through my work. But lately, it feels like there’s no other way to process the shitshow unfolding in front of us. The Bunker is my response to the suffocating fear gnawing at me — my way of confronting the bubble we’re trapped in, where we’re either clinging to some delusion of safety or desperately hoping things will magically be fine. Spoiler: they’re not. The more I look at this painting, the more I feel the pulse — the urgency to do something, anything — before it’s too late. To stop pretending.

I don’t know what kind of future we’re heading toward. But The Bunker is my way of facing that unknown, of capturing the feeling of being trapped and aware of the storm barreling toward us. We can’t hide. We can’t keep retreating to our safe, isolated spaces and pretending it’s not happening. Because it is. And it’s not going away.

This is the only way I can keep this conversation going — through urgency. Through raw, unfiltered truth. I never wanted to make political art. But now? I couldn’t avoid it if I tried.

And if you’re feeling this too? Maybe pick up a hand-signed giclée print of The Bunker from my shop. It’s limited-edition, numbered, and available in three sizes. Framing? Yeah, I can hook you up. Just reach out. Sign up for the newsletter. Let’s make it happen. Buy some art if you can.