raw vision

'The religious and the macabre are a big part of my personality,' Nick Blinko said, adding wryly '...there wouldn't be much left without them.' Not all the faces in Blinko's fantastically intricate confrontations with his own demons are malignant: among the skulls, imps, fractured dolls, leather-clad foetuses, oranges that might be little suns (- branded with the cross), idols, mushroom-beings, phalluses...there are ironic faces, mischievous things. There is more than a hint of humour in Blinko's conversation, too. He is affable and articulate and responds politely to the questions from the interviewer, but when the tapes of the conversations (two of them, almost a year apart) are re-played, two things are evident.

He ís holding back. The 35 year-old talks readily enough of producing pictures all his life, from the coats-of-arms he designed for his dolls through the 'Tudor Asylum drawn in white ink on black paper when he was nine or ten, and his copies of Nicholas Hilliard's Elizabethan miniatures one year later, to the wholly original masterworks dating from the mid -1980s which came about after months of working four to eight hours a day, sitting cross-legged on a bed in a state of hypnotic concentrated melancholia (his parents coming and going; 'Oh Look, he's done another inch!'), astonished at his own virtuosity; 'I got into it as a viewer as well as a producer.