I'm a mixed media artist and a writer of fiction and poetry. My art reflects a preoccupation with sampling and remixing papers, fabric, library discards, and anything old, worn, or forgotten found in flea markets and roadside junk. I look for language in offbeat, kitschy sources—manifestoes on personal magnetism, odd medical histories, treatises by clairvoyants. My painting method is one of layering, usually ink and acrylic followed by oil stick, papers, string, zippers, dried flowers, peppercorns, etc. The fiction has a fabulist, magical realist bent; the poetry, like the collages, often salvages and reworks language from found materials.
The art has been described as whimsical and surrealist, the writing as "Lydia Davis meets David Lynch.” Kirkus Reviews called my last book "a brilliantly imagined and transportive collection of surreal bedtime stories." Some of the work is informed by solastalgia, the melancholia we feel at impending environmental risk and crisis, a pervasive apprehension at living in the anthropocene. This mixture of mourning and wonderment, disquiet and delight, echoes throughout the work.
I live on Long Island and teach at St. John’s University in New York city.
Over the years I’ve taken photos of hundreds of works of art in galleries & museums that catch my eye. I always make sure to snap a shot of the accompanying didactic art card as well. The writing found on these cards can be informative but also pretentious and silly. I decided to write a fake introduction to my own work using passages pulled from the many art cards I’ve got stored on my phone, with slight embellishments. The name of the author of this piece is an anagram of my full name (middle name: Vincent).
“An Introduction to the Work of Derek Owens”
by Rev. Otis Neck-Wenden
The son of theosophists who followed the teachings of 19th century spiritualist Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), Derek Owens was exposed to polytheistic beliefs at an early age. He was drawn to worn and splintered materials like stained, threadbare scraps with burn marks and holes; gestures and materials treated as fossils and cryptic semiotics.
His work emanates a ritualistic presence, evoking themes of ecstatic mysticism; his vocabulary of form is based on the painter simply taking a fish, a snail, and a butterfly, and shaping a new mythical creature from these beings. Books wrapped in real rabbit’s fur. A post-apocalyptic vision of the Brooklyn waterfront. Recipes for malevolent curries to feed one’s creditors.
Before embarking on a career in the arts, Owens worked as both an itinerant dairymaid and a failed chemist where he developed a unique decorative style based on his occult inclinations. As Owens pursued his central ambition—to make painting as eerie and disquiet as it can be—he increasingly moved the medium into four dimensions, abandoning the academic traditions he’d studied and devoting himself completely to making preternatural diagrams. Observe here how the three witches prepare ointments that they will smear over their bodies to enable them to fly.
Working on mammoth sheets of handmade Chilean paper, his talismans of human hair knotted to ward off bad luck suggest recombined appendages divorcing the rhetoric of enthronement from any fantasy of power. His language-based drawings not only twist and curve but enclose, surround, and encircle.
One notices immediately a profound commitment to carrying out verbs. Only after weeding through his cacophony of German, French, and English phrases does one take notice of a figure with eyes closed, lying in a shirt and tie, crossing strata of time. Downtick Neverseen, Owens’s biographer, writes: “The hot palette of the Post-Impressionists, Gauguin and Van Gogh, the tropical chromisms of the Fauves, never shone more brilliantly.”
The recursive nature of Owens’s work embodies contemporary mechanisms of reflection and feedback whose non-linear and fractal dynamics are inherent to life and matter itself: a post-anthropocentric diorama in which ontologically solipsistic, subjective horrors and wonders, both inside and outside the rational notions of history, comprise a landscape reflected in an all-encompassing documentation of the collapse of the real, taking the viewer on a journey through a series of haptic and uncanny displays of felt, human perspective in an age of rapid automation--a hand-written presentation of sympathetic, over-emotive and personal responses, written in an exaggerated calligraphy. He was real fond of bugs.
“Rhythm and space, space and rhythm, how can I learn more about them?” Owens asked himself in an early diary entry. “Well, old girl, you’ll have to get down and dig.” And so Owens painted this allegory of the destruction of Europe at the onset of the Second World War, shortly after he had suffered a mental breakdown, creating dystopian sculptures from rugged, brutal materials like cast iron, concrete and steel. A complex cosmology, an act of exorcism.
Most of his fantastic many-figured scenes interweave naked, idealized figures and grotesque gnomes and grimaces. (One is only permitted to approach them barefooted and is not permitted to step over them.) This marked the end of Owens’s art career in Germany.
Following his dismissal, he indulged in the construction of so-called voids imbued with alchemical and zodiacal symbolisms. An argument brewed in his mind as he watched a Mexican jumping bean twitch and hop. Here one finds Owens paraphrasing Paolo Uccello’s commemoration of Florence’s victory over Siena in the Battle of San Romano in 1432, deliberately using a canvas of the same dimensions, the primary difference being the Pokemon monsters battling it out against a backdrop of suburban shopping malls engulfed in flame.
Owens’s later work suggests both short bursts of dexterously composed slapdash energy . The objects have the look of meteorites threatening our existence. Wondrous micro-landscapes illustrating nature’s quasi-visceral orifices. A pilfering of words and phrases from encyclopedic French dictionaries. Hypnotic spirals of colored oils and wax in networks of interlocking rooms. A clover flower picked by the poet from his father’s grave; grapes eaten by the Christ child; barely legible handwriting.
From valleys bathed in the light of invisible moons, to depictions of an astonishing black mass and mythical unicorns swallowing and being swallowed, his flat-footed approach perfectly suits the muted sense of apocalypse of our time, incited by nuclear meltdowns, hostage crises, and gas shortages. He lost an eye in an accident at age ten and went on to become one of the greatest fill-in-the-blanks of the nineteenth century.
He shall be remembered as a distant figure, waving back at us from the desolate horizon, melding the ghostly cosmos with the word “oleander.”