Joe Machine

📙 Joe Machine is an English artist, poet and writer. He is a founding member of the Stuckists art group. His work is "raw and autobiographical". Recurrent images are emaciated women, sailors and bloodshed. He has shown fighting dogs (one lying dead) and a sailor having his throat slit . Other images are Ute Lemper , and Diana Dors with an axe and also with a sub-machine gun. My Grandfather Will Fight You depicts a gaunt older man with clenched fists and blood-spattered shirt. It was painted on two old wooden boards which he nailed together (the join can be seen halfway up the painting). He has commented on this work: "My grandfather was a Romany boxer, but sometimes fought bare-knuckle, which his own father did for a living. I loved my grandfather, although I was aware that other people were frightened of him. He always treated me with a great deal of love. It's left me between two worlds - love and violence. It was definitely an emotive painting: I felt he was looking at me. In some ways he wouldn't have been very happy about it, because he was a very private man. What I study more than anything else is the human shadow. The need to paint something until you've shown as much of it as you can".