Nick Blinko

A-D

16 Dec

Part artist, part lead singer of the heavy punk band Rudimentary Peni, Nick Blinko (b.1961) has a cult following who appreciate him on both levels. His drawings depict fantastically intricate confrontations with his own demons yet not all the faces in his work are malignant: among the skulls, imps, fractured dolls, and phalluses, there are ironic faces and mischievous things. Blinko said, “My initial intention was to try to depict melancholy … I got frustrated at the attempts to depict suicidal depression realistically, and I got more and more into detail.” Colin Rhodes said of his work, “His images are constructed of microscopically detailed elements, sometimes consisting of literally hundreds of interconnecting figures and faces, which he draws without the aid of magnifying lenses and which contain an iconography that places him in the company of the likes of Bosch, Bruegel and the late Goya.”

Sitting for days on end, Blinko balances a drawing board across his knees and, using the finest of pens, obsessively conjures the most complex, unedited patterns. An exhibition at the National Schizophrenia Fellowship in 1994 first bought his art to the public’s attention and his work is now represented in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. Blinko often reminisces about his time spent in institutions, however the more orthodox treatments left him with a painful paradox: if he submitted to medication, his concentration went, and his brain and hand and eye could not work in concert. But the productive times without the drugs meant exposure to the full force of psychic torment and delusions.