Art Works: Ethan-Carrick Maguire

I suspect my obsession with gore and the darker side of life has come about through a cocktail of Judge Dredd (movies and comics), and the funny yet violent Cornetto trilogy. As a twelve-year old from St Ann’s, living in the ‘hood’ equips me with a passion to do well in life. I want to promote where I come from and better the general perception that people have formed of Nottingham from the media.

I’ve adopted a messy and disheveled style to create an aura of displacement and detachment. The radioactive colour choice for the title also symbolises how the psychotic character could explode, causing mass destruction at any time. It’s the extremity of this man’s midlife crisis that gives the piece a comical element.

Midlife Crisis was designed on my iPad on Procreate with the theme being gore. The subject is a family man who has achieved a medical degree but who has also become disenchanted with ‘normal’ life and has decided to leave it all behind and head for the hills. There, he develops feelings of hatred and turns psychotic, now ruled by his murderous twitches. Regretting every decision he has ever made, his life becomes a coldhearted bloodbath - filled with the odd page three of The Sun.

In the piece you can see the man’s degree and a photograph of his old family hanging on the back wall. This symbolises the fact that underneath all his confusion there is still a bright light hanging up behind him, just out of view. The sequence of his life events are expressed from left to right of the image. In the background are the past; first the degree, then the family, then you move across to the window. The view from the window shows an isolated landscape of hills and trees, isolated like the life the murderer has chosen. In the foreground, his present life, is the result of this midlife crisis - a crazy, blood-thirsty psychopath, bathing in body parts and washing his blood-stained hands. He’s been churned through the meat-grinder that is life, to create a life of spam.