“Blistering sun coming again. Agent of pain. Ambassador of the sick. Watch the world burn. Watch the world churn. Hatred never did describe, the loathing in my brain. Bitterness spirited on its way. Icy veins murmur rumors of my death. All too soon I assure you. Violence born from a ruined soul. Everything’s bleak so why not just accept it. Shut down hopes. Broken valley of dying dreams. What you pray for will never come. A rolling rise of human blood. Waste nothing and gain everything. Punch the ticket and let me go again. One last ride on the eternal suicide train. Brain emptied on the carpet.”
– Stephen William Voyles ©
11″ x 14″
Charcoal & Colored Pastels
Stephen Voyles’s art is a means of communication and self-expression but also an internal conflict resolution.He is using inverted symbols of the sacred as a unique therapeutic approach.
9″ x 12″
Ball Point Pen
First time when I saw his art, my mind went back to the Ensor’s Entry of Christ into Brussels or even further to Bacon’s study after Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X and I couldn’t deny the fact that he transmits pure grotesque. The main difference is that his form of grotesque describes the aberration from an ideal heavenly world where everything is light and beauty and love into a (I would rather say) reality that many of us can’t handle and see.
The ugly, the disfigured, mutilated characters are a mirror of now days modern society and I dare to say that his images are more real than any hyper-realist could do. It is sad and it is depressing to show anyone what the real world has become. The Golden Age of humanity is long gone and now welcome the mutants, the zombies, the lunatics, the wars, the crimes,the bastards, the mutilated…
11″ x 14″
Sharpie Markers
Do you, the viewer see them? No, because you are delusional and you embraced yourself into a slow death of day to day,over and over clone of one momentum. Stephen Voyles though…sees everything. He not only removed his own blindfolds but he tries to show everyone else the naked truth.
He is selling his art through Paypal and/or locally. If you are interested in any of his originals or prints(yes he sells prints too) then feel free to contact him.
Victor Hugo used to say that: ”ideal beauty has only one standard whereas the variations and combinations possible for the grotesque are limitless.” It is not that Stephen Voyles’s art is pure infinite imagination but rather that each and every image of his has one reality (or what we perceive as reality) counterpart. He has the ability to overthrow boundaries and he is in fact destabilizing, transgressing and overkilling them.
