#joe machine

first posted in facebook november 15, 2025

joe machine -- "my grandfather will fight you" (2001)

"i loved him and feared him. he was a fighter and a man of violence. boxing and violence was his life" … joe machine (on his grandfather)

"when my grandpa was moved to physical action, you felt utter terror" … liev schreiber

"my grandpa died last week and they buried him in the rocks everyone still talks about how badly they are shocked but me, i expected it to happen i knew he'd lost control when he built a fire on main street and he shot it full of holes" … bob dylan

"my grandpa was a preacher" … dolly parton

Joe Machine, b. 1973 Self-Portrait with Cigarette UK (undated) [Source]

Flux Magazine reports:

Joe Machine comes from a Romany background, born on the Isle of Sheppey, with his young life as a boy was spent in the seaside town of Chatham, Kent. He began working as a six-year old, absorbing the moves of men on the streets after nights of heavy drinking. Much of his work is dominated by a recurring sailor theme with a young Joe actually exposed to many of the violent escapades enacted in his paintings. The sailors are all of a painfully thin build which Joe told me was influenced by his grandfather, who was quite poorly when Joe was a child and died when Joe was just seven...

Elizabeth Beecher artist Joe Machine celebrates solo Exhibition at the New Cock'n'Bull Gallery.

  Joe Machine is an artist with a remarkable life story. From a youth involved in petty crime, including a spell in Borstal, he has risen to be a much respected professional artist, with a strong commitment to helping others. In the current issue of the London Magazine, Britain’s oldest literary periodical, the critic Edward Lucie-Smith compares him to William Blake, and also sees him as being in some respects comparable to Francis Bacon. He is one of a distinguished succession of important British artists who, from the early 19th century onwards, have made their way to success with little or no professional formation.

  This solo show, ‘Machine Evolution’, at the new Cock n’Bull gallery, which forms part of Tramshed, Mark Hix’s hugely successful Shoreditch restaurant, features three different series of paintings. One is devoted to the Book of Genesis, considered (Joe Machine says) “as the story of a failure.” The paintings contain occasional references to hermetic doctrines, particularly Rosicrucianism, which makes them comparable to the illustrations in Blake’s Prophetic Books. A second series is devoted to the history of the Russian Revolution, also considered as a tragic failure. Yet a third series consists of Kentish landscapes, with a mystical tinge that may remind some spectators of the work of Samuel Palmer.

  These series will be shown in succession during the three-week run of the exhibition., which will also serve as a launch-pad for a richly illustrated hardcover book, sponsored by the London Collectors’ Club.