MARK HOPPER

Mark Hopper: Painfully Pretty, Plastic Misdemeanour Series, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark Hopper: Crash Alien, Man Who Smashed Earth Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Life is all about stories, about discoveries and understandings. Stories are journeys, narratives that rumble over the years of your life, but also that rumble over the generations of voices, crunching over the bones of lives lived and unlived, stories told and untold. Narratives rumble on, seemingly regardless and certainly relentless.

Art is the great story, and the artist is the great storyteller. Art is a theme of our lives that is often seen as ephemeral, a sideline, bearing no real consequence on who we are and where we are going, but of course that is both a purposeless and purposeful misconstruct, art is everything. Art and artists tell the story that others can't, they join up the cosmic dots, allowing us to see what its all about. Mark Hopper is one of those artists.

Mark Hopper: Transmission Prophet, The Road To Hell Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark Hopper: My Sickening Fear, The Man Who Smashed Earth Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark is an artist that lifts the veil, uncovers the mask, tears into the shared human subconscious and reveals what there is to find, horrors and certainties, love and pain, accidents and malice. Mark produces work that is on the one hand a carnival of the grotesque, and on the other hand a theatre of complexity. 

Certainty is nowhere to be found in Mark's work beyond the certainty that none will ever be found. This is an artist that deals with the maelstrom, that found in our contemporary dysfunctional world, and that found in the longer term world, the world that gave birth to the ape that we are, the ape that we have stretched immeasurable beyond, but the ape that is still dancing around inside us, excited, scared, loving and malevolent.

Mark Hopper: Blind Faith, The Road To Hell Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark Hopper: Suck It and Sin, The Road To Hell Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark's work is upfront and in your face, purposely so. This is not work that will be universally liked, nor should it be. Art should make you uncomfortable, uneasy, on edge. It should make you ask difficult questions, consider the dark as much as the light. We are a broken vessel of daytime and night, we have angels and we have monsters, and the monsters are unleashed by Mark in their droves.

With titles for series of work that include: The Man Who Smashed Earth, The Road to Hell, The Executioner, Mark slams you up against the wall, the wall built up of the irrational, the greedy, the depraved. These are the undercurrents of what it is to be human, the undercurrents that many don't like to talk about in polite society. It is the slick dark flow of consciousness that is deemed by the morally stuck as 'unfriendly', 'unnecessary', 'difficult', and so it is.

Mark Hopper: Exploding Christ, The Road To Hell Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark Hopper: Sod Is An Angel, The Road To Hell Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark and his work play a valuable role in this upside down world that we live in. A world of irony and falsehood, a world of masks and curtains, a world imagined real, but desperately unreal. Mark gives us the world of 'warts and all', and yes it's uncomfortable, but don't we need to know where we are, rather than where we imagine that we are?

Mark Hopper: False Prophets, The Executioner Project: Electric Chair Series, 2016 (digital artwork)

Mark Hopper: Crucified Brain Injury, The Road To Hell Project, 2016 (digital artwork)

All work is copyrighted to the artist. Please ask permission before sharing imagery. Thank you.