John Tottenham
After graduating with a degree in fine art from London’s worst art school in the mid-80’s, John Tottenham moved to the United States. An old-fashioned pencil and paper/paint and brushes man—an educated outsider and academic primitive—he has produced hundreds of pen and ink drawings of desolate vernacular scenes, overlaid with darkly humorous text, as well as a series of small “Victorian Choking Paintings,” perverse renderings of Victorian romantic couples in idyllic bucolic surroundings—and a series of “Walker” paintings, which depict female nudes holding prosthetic devices in sun-drenched rooms. Over the last few years Tottenham has had several solo shows in Los Angeles: Las Cienegas Projects (2010), Rosamund Felsen Gallery (2012), and Maloney Fine Art (2014).
He is also the author of several books of poetry “The Inertia Variations”, an epic cycle on the subject of work-avoidance, indolence, failure and related topics, and “Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment”, a sequence of mean-spirited love poems with particular respect paid to the institution of marriage, and his acerbically entertaining essays about the art world and life in Los Angeles appear regularly in Artillery Magazine.