JESSE WAUGH
PINK ROSES AT ARLEY WALLED GARDEN
2017
OIL ON CANVAS
195 X 114 CM

With Pink Roses at Arley Walled Garden I succeeded at imbuing a truly Art Nouveau style into painting. The overall aspect of Pink Roses at Arley Walled Garden is effectively realist, but the post-impressionist brush strokes, floral subject matter, and somewhat asymmetrical composition are all characteristics I would associate with Art Nouveau.

I very much want to bridge Art Nouveau into the current epoque, because I view it as the last sincere mass attempt at creating Beauty in art. I also view Art Nouveau as being the last gasp of the Renaissance / Enlightenment, before art was deliberately caste into a chasm of reductionism - an abyss of disfigurement and outright ruination - in the 20th century.

It dawned on me yesterday that true Modernism - that of the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionists, Aestheticists, and practitioners of Art Nouveau / Jugendstil / Modernismo / Liberty style - was in fact hijacked by nefarious forces (groups akin to the Franklin School which promoted Cultural Marxism), whose only goal was to destroy art in every way possible, and to murder Beauty in order to effect social change with aims at mediocritization of the masses. 

The thing that sparked that realization in me was a seemingly unrelated - or at least quite different phenomenon - the history of rap music. Rap music started out generally positive in the 1970s and 80s, but in the early nineties it made a drastic and catastrophic turn into becoming "gangsta rap" - which degraded society tremendously, and decimated black culture in America and abroad. A story - which may or may not be true - surfaced on the internet in the mid-noughties (2000s) which stated that the promotion of gangsta rap was in fact a coordinated effort by music industry bigwigs to alter culture. The anonymous author of the piece - which again may or may have not been true - stated that he had attended a secret meeting of music industry moguls who advocated the transformation of rap into gangsta rap, the author refused to participate in the transforming of rap into gangsta rap, and was consequently asked to leave the meeting.

Regardless of whether the above conspiracy theory is true, it made me realize that the same thing could have happened to Modernism - that started out as a sincere rebellion against academic tyranny, but was co-opted by nefarious forces for ulterior purposes.

Anyone who thinks I am merely being paranoid might peruse the following articles in which it is stated by mainstream media outlets that Abstract Expressionism was used as a CIA weapon during the Cold War: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html and http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia These articles prove, at the very least, that art has indeed been manipulated in the past for socio-political purposes.