Maximum Power, Minimum Effort (2025)

This painting takes a cheeky swipe at the kind of politician who swaggers into power, convinced that charm and bluster will hold everything together. It’s about the madness of ego - the idea that confidence alone can paper over the cracks caused by chaos.

The bright, almost fluorescent oranges and clashing shapes are meant to feel loud and unmissable, a bit like a personality that fills every room whether you want it to or not. Beneath the surface though, there’s confusion, scribbled equations, half-formed thoughts - all the noise and nonsense that come with pretending to have all the answers.

When I started Maximum Power, Minimum Effort, I wanted to capture what happens when ego and authority spiral out of control - when people start believing their own mythology. This contemporary abstract painting is built from layers of mixed media, collage, and textured paint, packed with scribbled symbols, fragments of newsprint, and half-buried figures. It’s chaotic on purpose - that sense of confusion and spectacle that political power often hides behind.

As a UK artist, I’ve always been drawn to painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg - artists who weren’t afraid to mix beauty and brutality, text and image, politics and poetry. Their influence runs through this expressionist, politically charged artwork, but this piece is my own take: a messy, loud, and slightly mocking portrait of what happens when the drive for power outweighs the effort to understand or care.

Personally, for me, Maximum Power, Minimum Effort is both a satirical modern artwork and a kind of visual protest - part chaos, part warning - a reflection on how easily control slips into corruption. Maximum Power, Minimum Effort is really my way of laughing at the current show - the theatre of power and the people who mistake attention for achievement. It’s satire wrapped in colour, and maybe a little warning too about what happens when we let noise drown out common sense.