Cubism: Is It Really Art

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this bold and energetic work is both a celebration and a provocation. The title is spelled directly onto the canvas — CUBISM, IS IT REALLY ART? — the lettering large, confident and integrated into the composition itself, so that the question becomes part of the painting it is asking about. Across the canvas, a riot of geometric shapes, fragmented faces, a guitar, a cat, a figure in flame — all rendered in vivid primary colours against a background of interlocking planes of blue, pink, green and yellow.

Cubism was developed between 1907 and 1914 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), and is widely regarded as the most revolutionary development in Western art since the Renaissance. By fragmenting objects and figures into geometric forms and depicting them from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, Cubism broke entirely with the tradition of representing the world as it appears to the eye. The work invites the viewer to sit with the discomfort that question provokes — and in doing so, to answer it for themselves.

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this striking large-scale work is the companion piece to Speak No Evil / Do No Evil, together completing the full set of the Three Wise Monkeys — the ancient Japanese principle of Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru and Shizaru, whose origins lie in a 17th century carving at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. Two female figures dominate the black canvas, rendered in stark black and white, their red-nailed hands pressed over eyes and ears respectively. Flashes of blue at the eyes and vivid red lips provide the only colour — sensation deliberately silenced.

The two works together form a complete moral statement. To hear no evil and see no evil is presented not as innocence but as choice — the active decision to block out what one does not wish to know. The red nails and red lips suggest these are not naive figures but knowing ones. They have chosen not to see. They have chosen not to hear. The work asks what responsibility comes with that choice.

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this striking large-scale work is the companion piece to Speak No Evil / Do No Evil, together completing the full set of the Three Wise Monkeys — the ancient Japanese principle of Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru and Shizaru, whose origins lie in a 17th century carving at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. Two female figures dominate the black canvas, rendered in stark black and white, their red-nailed hands pressed over eyes and ears respectively. Flashes of blue at the eyes and vivid red lips provide the only colour — sensation deliberately silenced.

The two works together form a complete moral statement. To hear no evil and see no evil is presented not as innocence but as choice — the active decision to block out what one does not wish to know. The red nails and red lips suggest these are not naive figures but knowing ones. They have chosen not to see. They have chosen not to hear. The work asks what responsibility comes with that choice.

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this work draws its visual language directly from the iconic digital rain sequence of The Matrix (1999) — the cascading green code that has come to represent the hidden infrastructure of the digital world. Across a deep black ground, columns of binary code, the word DNA, Bitcoin symbols and globe icons fall vertically in bright acid green and yellow-green, echoing the film's vision of reality as data — a simulation underpinning everything we see and touch.

At the base of the canvas, DARKGABLE.COM is painted in bold green lettering, anchoring the work to its creator. The inclusion of Bitcoin symbols and DNA alongside binary code suggests a broader meditation on what constitutes the fundamental building blocks of modern existence — is it genetics, currency, or code? The work asks whether we are living through a moment as significant as the double helix or the digital revolution — and whether we even know it yet.

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this work is a direct homage to Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), the Dutch abstract painter whose signature style — bold black lines dividing the canvas into rectangles of white, red, yellow and blue — became one of the most recognisable visual languages of the 20th century. Mondrian's style, known as De Stijl or Neoplasticism, was rooted in a belief that art should strip the visible world back to its most essential elements: line, plane and primary colour. In doing so, he argued, art could achieve a universal harmony beyond the chaos of the natural world.

Here, the grid and block structure of Mondrian is preserved faithfully — the canvas divided into clean rectangular fields of white, red, blue, teal, yellow and brown, separated by bold black lines. At its centre sits the word DARKGABLE.COM, each letter painted in a different colour, playful and personal against the formal geometry surrounding it. It is a statement of identity placed squarely within the history of abstract art — the artist's own name written into one of modernism's most enduring and disciplined frameworks, and made entirely their own.

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this powerful close-up portrait depicts a female face rendered in stark black and white, from which vivid red bleeds in two places — trails of crimson running down from both eyes like tears, and bold red lips parted slightly below. The composition is deliberately minimal: no background, no colour beyond the red, no detail beyond what is essential. The effect is immediate and visceral.

The image draws on a long tradition of the wounded or weeping face in art — from religious iconography of the Virgin Mary to the distorted, anguished figures of Francis Bacon and the raw emotional portraiture of Egon Schiele. But where those traditions used suffering to elevate or sanctify, this work strips it back to something more immediate and personal. The tears are not water. Whatever is being felt here has gone beyond the ordinary.

The red lips suggest beauty, performance, the public face — while the bleeding eyes suggest something private breaking through. It is a painting about the cost of holding yourself together, and the moment when you no longer can.

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this large and commanding work is a close-up portrait reduced to its most essential elements — two eyes and a nose, filling the entire canvas, staring directly outward. But these are no ordinary eyes. In each iris, in place of colour, sits the globe — the entire world, rendered in deep green and blue, contained within a single gaze.

Around the central face, the canvas erupts into a field of gestural colour — blocks and brushstrokes of orange, red, yellow, teal, purple and brown scattered across the surface like fragments of thought or experience. On the left eye, red drips downward like tears or blood, echoing themes found elsewhere in the collection.

The title draws on the ancient proverb — beauty is in the eye of the beholder — but the work expands that idea considerably. If the world itself sits in your eyes, then what you see, how you see it, and what you choose to look at becomes everything. The painting asks: what world do you carry in your gaze? And what does it cost to see clearly?

Painted in acrylic on canvas, this large-scale work depicts two of the most iconic figures in comic book history — Batman and the Joker — locked in their eternal opposition. Batman looms above as a massive black silhouette, his cape spread wide, the bat symbol cut sharply into his chest. Below him, rendered in vivid colour, is the Joker — green-haired, white-faced, his red-slashed grin unmistakable. The composition draws heavily on the visual language of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), in which Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker became one of cinema's most celebrated and haunting performances.

The two figures represent one of fiction's great philosophical dualities — order against chaos, discipline against anarchy, the man who will not kill against the man who cannot stop. The Joker famously tells Batman: "You complete me." This painting asks whether that is true — whether every hero requires a villain to justify their existence, and whether the line between the two is as clear as either would like to believe.