DAVID HOWARD

Fashionable Peace Signs

I am starting to work on the AI component of my current series. It's like dredging up images from hell. It reminds me of the monster created by using the alien technology in the fantastic film 'Forbidden Planet'. Also, when getting the AI to reinterpret my original artwork, I ask it to write an essay as well - it's all very disturbing. The essay is below.

This of course is my way of grappling with our current paradigm - as an artist. One could say "where is beauty, where is love, where is the soul, where is the transcendent" There is much more to say on this subject.

**Fashionable Peace Signs** - Ai Essay.

A procession of improbable figures occupies an unsettled space between theatre, dream, and devotion. Animal heads, elongated necks, looping forms, mechanical structures, and a garment marked with repeating peace symbols combine to create an image that feels ancient and contemporary at once. The work resists narrative certainty, presenting a world of signs whose meanings remain deliberately unstable.

The central figure, clothed in turquoise and adorned with repeated peace emblems, stands among a gathering of hybrid beings that appear part creature, part relic, and part mask. Around them, coils, rings, supports, and circular forms weave an intricate framework. These objects suggest both protection and restraint, functioning as symbols of the structures through which meaning is organised. The peace sign, a familiar emblem of harmony and collective aspiration, is transformed through repetition into something more ambiguous. It becomes ornament, pattern, ritual mark, and question. When a symbol is endlessly reproduced, does it continue to carry its original meaning, or does it become a fashionable surface detached from its source?

The visual language draws upon qualities found in medieval painting and manuscript illumination. Medieval artists frequently populated sacred narratives and marginal spaces with fantastic beasts, grotesques, and hybrid forms that existed beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience. Such imagery was rarely decorative alone. It occupied a symbolic realm where spiritual, moral, and philosophical questions could be explored indirectly. The creatures gathered here seem to emerge from that same imaginative territory. They function less as characters than as embodiments of ideas, inviting contemplation rather than explanation.

The painting also engages with a long philosophical tradition concerning the relationship between appearance and reality. The masks, animal forms, and fragmented bodies suggest identities that remain fluid rather than fixed. One figure merges with another. A body becomes an object. A mechanical support acquires a biological quality. The work recalls the notion, present in thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche, that human beings do not encounter truth directly but through layers of symbols, images, and interpretations. Meaning is always mediated. Every sign reveals something while concealing something else.

The central garment introduces a further tension. The peace sign, one of the most recognisable symbols of the modern world, inhabits a landscape populated by creatures that seem displaced from myth, dream, or memory. The result is a collision between contemporary ideology and older symbolic traditions. The motif appears reassuring at first glance, yet its repetition generates uncertainty. It asks whether symbols of peace retain their power through use, or whether they risk becoming decorative badges worn without reflection.

The various circular motifs that recur throughout the composition reinforce these concerns. Rings, coils, halos, openings, and enclosures suggest cycles of return, continuity, and transformation. In medieval art, circular forms frequently signified eternity, divine order, and the perfection of cosmic structures. Here they appear less certain. They bind, contain, support, and entangle. Their meaning remains unresolved, shifting according to the viewer's perspective.

The muted surface and weathered textures further complicate the reading of the image. The painting feels excavated rather than produced, as though fragments of different ages have been brought together into a single visual field. Ancient forms coexist with contemporary symbols. The sacred and the ordinary occupy the same space. What emerges is neither nostalgia nor critique, but a meditation on the persistence of symbols across time and the ways in which cultures continually remake inherited meanings.

Ultimately, *Fashionable Peace Signs* examines the fragile boundary between belief and image. It asks how symbols acquire authority, how they survive the passage of time, and how they continue to shape collective imagination long after their original context has faded. The figures may appear strange, even humorous, yet beneath their eccentric forms lies a serious inquiry into the human need to create meaning from signs, rituals, and stories. Like the creatures that inhabit medieval manuscripts, they stand at the threshold between the visible and the invisible, inviting the viewer into a world where certainty gives way to mystery, and where every image conceals another image waiting to be revealed.

I have been starting to think about the physical space to show these works when completed - 84 works of various sizes. As you yet I have no gallery planned, but I have a few plans on the design - but nothing definite yet.