Mikey Georgeson

Mikey Georgeson (born 1967) is an English artist, working in various media.

He is a painter and illustrator, who regularly exhibits his work at Sartorial Contemporary Art and other galleries.

As "the Vessel", he is songwriter and singer of the cult art-rock band, David Devant and his Spirit Wife.

Side projects have included Carfax, a collaboration with Jyoti Mishra, Glam Chops, a glam rock band formed with Eddie Argos of Art Brut, This Happy Band and Mikey Georgeson and the Civilised Scene.

Georgeson has also performed and recorded on his own, as Mr Solo.

Peter Kimpton, writing in The Guardian praised Georgeson's "impish genius for melody".

Ashley Hames, in the Huffington Post, described Georgeson as 'an original British songwriter of lasting quality.

He remains a presence somehow transcendent and other-worldly, bringing us songs that seem to have always existed, holding up the mirror to connect us to something we can truly love.'

After a childhood in Bexhill-on-Sea and Horsham, Mikey Georgeson attended Worthing College of Art (1985–86) and Chelsea School of Art (1986–1989), where he studied illustration when it was a figurative painting course.

In 1989, he moved to Brighton, for a postgraduate illustration degree at Brighton University (1989–91).

As an illustrator, he published a series of quirky screenprinted booklets, which he sold in Brighton gallery shops.

A Shady Tale (1993) contained a series of unlikely shadowgraphy images.

The Hat He Mistook for His Wife (1993), reversing the title of Oliver Sacks' famous book, showed a fedora hat in various marital situations – covered with confetti, posing for a honeymoon photograph beside the Eiffel Tower, on a caravanning holiday, and being weighed on bathroom scales.

Georgeson lectures in art at the University of East London, and is a practising painter.

In July 2007, Georgeson began to create a drawing every morning on waking, beginning to draw before he knew what the image would become.

He posted them on [https://www.instagram.com/mikeygeorgeson/?

Instagram] and, in 2023, the first two months' drawings were published as a book, The Early Morning Drawings, by the Portuguese publisher, Stolen Books.

In his introduction, Georgeson described the project as a "trance-ritual":

"Looking through them I rediscovered a feeling of emergence that has compelled me back into region of the trance-ritual every morning....They are an expression of fury at the oppressors of lazy joy who insist on the taxonomies of fixed, pregiven ideas. Nothing is really a discrete concept and entanglement is a bio-social fact if only we could inhabit our emerging fiction. The morning drawings are a way to remind myself of the feeling of immanence in daring to explore the less good idea instead of waiting for the best one."

He has exhibited his work in the following group exhibitions: 'Wapobaloobop', Transition Gallery London 2008, 'Legends of Circumstance' Whitecross Gallery London 2009, Bargate Gallery Southampton 2010 and the Liverpool Biennial 2010.

In London, he has had three solo shows: 'My Magic Life' Sartorial Art 2008, 'Father, Son & Holy Smoke', Bear Gallery 2009, and 'Tragicosmic' at Sartorial Art in 2010

Georgeson describes his paintings, which use thickly applied bright oil colours, as "a distillation of a desire to capture what I consider to be episodic globules in the glistening, sticky fluid called paint."

With My Magic Life, his 2008 exhibition inspired by magic and David Devant, he brought the different strands of his work together.

Georgeson explained in the exhibition catalogue:

"I believe in magic and the power of following passions to lead to instances of backwards causality. In his autobiography there is an illustration of Devant making a ghost disappear 'in front of a critical audience' which, as a title alone, has parallels to painting pictures if you ask me....About the time Harry Pye first suggested time was right for a Devant themed show, I was sorting through some books I hadn't touched since they had come into my possession via my polymath cousin, Ricky Rhubarb. The first chapter of the first book was a sketch of Augustus John basically saying he was a bit hit or miss but when his work clicked 'one stares at it with amazement as if this were a Maskelyne and Devant trick and one saw a box floating in mid air'. My jaw slackened and I read on to discover the next chapter was a poetical tip toe through the dichotomy of magic and science. Reaching for my lighter I found it gone.

Coincidence?

No I don't smoke any more."

In June 2012, Georgeson exhibited a new solo show, 'Trope' at the Royal Standard in Liverpool.

According to the gallery website, Georgeson identifies the 'Trope' as 'the crack that opens between the audience (life) and the artist (art).

Eleven paintings in the show focus on Georgeson's ongoing love of Liverpool Football Club as a trope through which he can explore 'sending an emissary from his adult rational self to mix with the transcendental awe of his childhood'.

He taps into memories of his boyhood bedroom in which his father had created a large scale recreation of the Kop, pasted together with faces cut from the Observer Magazine.'

In 2014, Georgeson began a doctorate in fine art, which he was awarded by the University of East London in 2019.

His doctoral thesis, The Vision of the Absurd, Aesthetic Machines, Entanglement and Affect, looked at the ways in which 'art has an excess that delivers understanding outside of conceptual cognition'.

In June 2015, he exhibited his first year paintings in the 'East London Artists' show at the UEL.

At the opening, he staged a live performance with the accordionist, Martin White, singing the song "Is David Bowie Happy?".

Georgeson explained, 'The show explores the idea that David Bowie saved his disciples from anomie (Is there life on Mars?) but potentially at the cost of the individuation of his psyche.

In the face of the vacuum of meaning created by post-history culture, rather than resorting to appropriate irony, meaning becomes the mystery of creation itself.'

As a tutor at UEL, Georgeson created the Dewey Decimal Dowsing Project, which "began as a way to make the library more engaging and accessible to new art students and also bring practice and research closer."

Students were asked to convert their name into a numerological value, used in the Dewey Decimal library code to locate a shelf in the library.

Using dowsing, the student would then select three books, create a clay effigy "to process the encountered knowledge" and then write "a simple scientific report (Title, Apparatus, Method, results, Conclusion)."