Gerison Dandler-Tharpe was born in 1953 in a henhouse in Tussle, Derbyshire. The only son of Barbara Whelke, to Ernest Milkstand, a wandering "Bogus-Major", itinerant saw-player and mountebank, Dandler-Tharpe's was a childhood of "wide eyed terror, joy, and sublime horror", as he was later to confess in an infamous radio interview with critic Valentine Purblinde-Batt.
The artist wept in that interview. "These are my salty jewels of sublimated joy; transmutations of the sea-mists and sadsavours of my grey, my gloamed Norfolk pain", he sobbed; - but his "defiant, weeping joy" became the mantra that was to power his creative life, "surging in and through the spindled frame" of the fishglue-factory caretaker who laboured 6 nights a week and spent his spare hours "hovering betwixt world and essence" in the 6th floor "attic cathedral" in Despond Lane, Addlezoyland, Somerset.
Dandler-Tharpe, whose assumed name "came from a phantasm-glory, a dream of a higher hue", was subject to periodical "moon-bleached vastness experiences", during which he was regularly accommodated at Hanger Grange, a "Monastery for the Victims of Monochrome Reality", and it was during these internments that his most intense works were "wrought in mine own innerimages". "Spires of Meat", "Afternoon Bloodbaskings II" and "Uninstalled Thrustingbackforth Thrivinglusts" were all products of these, what he was later to call "firing and flaming autonomous exploratory-polarisations of the inner surfacings".
"Calfrubber.Pitted" was created in 1991. It explores and exploits Dandler-Tharpe's brief term at Hissinglass Academy, Gwynneddyeth in the Autumn of 1971. Various elements - a fragment from an unanswered nonsensical letter to a fellow student Gwen Turtie (whose obsession with corrugated paper triangles left her little time for the naive but baroque approaches of Dandler-Tharpe); elements of 60s poster art and advert; devastating "shards" of a childhood memory of witnessing the slaughter of a favourite calf, "Star", and a consequent delerium - are woven into a "joy of horror graphic" that, in the words of Elena Epskampf-Czauria IV, "holographically embodies embedded intensities of raw and resuffered experience, discharges this recreated suffering joy of memory at the viewer, is an incendiary weapon of pent-in pressures".
Be our guest: partake of the "blasted and flung vision" of Gerison Dandler-Tharpe":-
