Prophe­cy

Fans of over­ly ambi­tious mid-’90s genre schlock may be sad­dened to dis­cov­er that Char­lie Paul’s film Prophe­cy is, alas, not a new addi­tion to that semi-beloved mini fran­chise in which Christo­pher Walken roams the Earth as the Archangel Gabriel. How­ev­er, hark­ing back to its cin­e­mat­ic name­sake, this is a sto­ry which involves a clash of fan­tas­ti­cal plains, God and The Dev­il con­verg­ing in the mind, and then com­plex images being trans­mit­ted direct­ly on to can­vas with assid­u­ous­ly mixed oils.

In this infor­ma­tive and light­ly abstract pro­file of the rumi­na­tive Glaswe­gian painter Peter How­son, Paul swerves the time­worn artist hagiog­ra­phy by explor­ing his sub­ject through a care­ful­ly nar­rowed lens. His film depicts the cre­ation of the tit­u­lar can­vas, chart­ing a jour­ney from crisp white rec­tan­gle the size of a bil­liard table, to intri­cate fres­co of haunched bod­ies, death­ly howls and grotesque detail.

Employ­ing dig­i­tal­ly-assist­ed time lapse pho­tog­ra­phy, the film trans­mits a sense of how much elbow grease goes into a sin­gle work, as lay­ers of colour build up, char­ac­ters appear then dis­ap­pear then appear again, and the shades oscil­late between deep sat­u­ra­tion to atmos­pher­ic sub­tle­ty. How­son says that his style rede­fines con­ven­tion­al notions of beau­ty, which is a fan­cy way of say­ing that what he does is extreme­ly ugly. It’s hard to pin­point all the var­i­ous ref­er­ence points, but it’s like Brueghel meets 2000AD – a fusion of the clas­si­cal and the cartoonish.

Pri­vate buy­ers can’t get enough of him, and much of his work is pur­chased ahead of its ini­tial exhi­bi­tion and then hangs in cham­bers that are away from pub­lic eyes. How­son comes across as a self-depre­ci­at­ing and world­ly fel­low, pitch­ing him­self as a work­ing class arti­san more than a high­fa­lutin artist. When he’s stand­ing away from the can­vas, he makes for a slight­ly sham­bling fig­ure, chug­ging on cig­gies and broad­cast­ing his crav­ings for a cheeky Burg­er King.

But when he comes in close, it’s almost as if he’s enter­ing a into a dif­fer­ent body, as we are able to observe the jaw-drop­ping intri­ca­cy of his brush strokes. The con­cept of see­ing a paint­ing come alive – from the con­struc­tion of the frame to its even­tu­al sale – is nice in the­o­ry, yet the final ten min­utes spent watch­ing the final work being shipped to New York makes you yearn for the shots of paint drying.