Making of The Dream of the Central Banker https://images.app.goo.gl/FxvvuH5MrnYN97jd9

In the words of Conor himself:

“This picture (see above) refers to some of the larger monetary disorders of our time.

That economists occasionally come up with naïve images to represent their ideas has been a boon to cartoonists in the financial papers, and ‘helicopter money’ is surely among the best of them.

I think it’s about time the subject received the fine-art treatment.

This picture celebrates some of the madness of our times, with its ‘heroic’ central bankers and their delusions of control.

It is part of a series of paintings loosely titled ‘Asymmetrical Warfare’.

This phrase sums up my entire career, but it has particular relevance to this current series of works because they deal explicitly with cultural conflict, with the crises of our times — political, ecological, financial, cultural and moral — and the warped perspectives that ensue.

These paintings represent a cultural battlefield. For me, they are a way of waging a small-scale war against modernity.

My chief accomplices in this enterprise have been my young children. With their aid, and the aid of their toy monsters, action figures, fire-trucks, helicopters, half-deflated balloon-globes and all the other paraphernalia of childhood, I’ve been able to construct in my studio miniature tableaux; dramatic assemblies of figurines and objects that refer, explicitly and symbolically, to the ‘big picture’; the great events of our time.

I then paint these, using all the tricks of pictorial illusionism — composition, perspective, light and colour — to render them as convincingly as possible.

Illusionism still has great artistic potential because reality is still something we find difficult and threatening.

I’ve heard it said that people can avoid facing reality, but they can’t avoid the consequences of not facing reality.

I think my work is very much bound up with these issues; with naturalism at one remove, with fantasy and disillusionment.

In our culture, to an historically unprecedented extent, affluence and industrial might have become weapons in a general war against reality, against nature.