You will have to refer back to my Judgement card to know what I am on about here. Unfortunately I have already used it on a blog here. I have been cheating. However, the picture shownb at the top here does plug some of the more recent artwork I have been doing, even if somewhat irrelevantly.
The link to my new artwork is at:
http://www.geocities.com/lyndastevens/gallery1.htm
The link to the Judgement card, meanwhile, is at
http://www.geocities.com/lyndastevens/Judgement.html
I posted this card on my photo album at the weekend and put the following caption under it: 'This card was based on weird dream I once had. I dreamt I was harbouring aliens in my cupboard from the authorities. Some had lost the power of speech and even lost their mouths but could communicate telepathically.'
I remember having another weird dream about the future too, where most people had mutated brains and lost the power of speech, though they could communicate telepathically, in a ruined nuclear desert.
I did this card in the mid 80's when bands like Killing Joke were helping to stoke up the jitteriness of knowing that we could all blow up the planet to kingdom come any minute, so that threat of the mushroom cloud hanging over us was ever-present. The news onTV showed the size of the bombs that each bloc had in graphic detail. - made it all like a great game and in fact there was a board game you could buy and play, called 'nuclear war' - not sure exactly who got to be the winner, but the first part of it involved World Domination, much like Monopoly. I remember there was a geat series too called 'whoops apocalypse,' where a Bomb was smuggled over various borders disguised as a work of art - a massive sculptured dick.
I used to vist bases like Greenham Common whilst my parents ducked behind their Daily Mails, which voiced the complaints of neighbours, who hated all these nasty women in league with communists and fouling up a respectable neighbourhood. My family lived next door to a traitor at the time - that is someone, who had spent time in prison for having sold secrets to the Russians - which further raised the temperature of Sunday-afternoon lunch fights over politics. It was all rather hilarious at times in a M.A.D sort of way, though. My father used to conspicuously smoke Churchill-size cigarettes in the garden and I occasionally got carrots an other phallic-shaped objects thrown at me for my own traitorous activities.
Interestingly, I have seen that there are now any number of critiques on Amazon of two of my favourite novels as a teen - well, one of them was harldy a favourite, as it gave me nightmares for weeks afterwards - On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. Actually, now I think the characters in the tale all had quite a good time of it dying - partied, followed their dreams and then just got on with the biz of popping the little cyanide tablet once they started feeling queasy. I would imagine now that in any similar scenario now, most people would behave far more badly than did Shute's stiff-uper-lip British characters and there would be no end of charlatans, offering courses on how to survive radiation through mind power and Positive Thinking alone. I understand there has also been another film made of it - must be the sense again that there is one too any nut at the helm these days for comfort, nowadays.
My other favourite book was The Chrysalids by John Wyndham - or christened Rebirth, over the Atlantic and is being force-fed to thousands of disgruntled schoolkids to read. (My mother did not let me read it when I was a small child). In that, there is yet another post-nuclear world, where (wouldn't you know it) only the Bible survives the holocaust - or Tribulation - and we end up in a Labrador dominated by fundies who believe that any kind of genetic mutation os the sign of the Devil. So a group of young telepaths must fight to keep their secret, secret. At the end of the story, the Good guys come to the rescue to whisk them all away to New Zealand, but not before showing that they have a penchant ofr exterminating beings of a lower order themselves. So congrats to Wyndham for not making this one another cozy catastrophe.
Have to admit, my outlook on life changed hugely after the 80's, so probably would never depict Judgement in quite this way now . a bit less of the sad hippy trimmings. Or maybe not. I take 2012 with a pinch of salt in so many ways, but that is not to say that maybe there will not be that much in the way of cozy endings - messy ones, possibly, yes.
