Blood, Paint and God

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Art and trauma come full circle in a new documentary covering one person’s harrowing youth and the indelible marks left by childhood traumas of endemic societal violence in 1970s & 1980s maritime Britain.

British painter, poet and writer Joe Machine has a story to tell.

It is very much his story, a true-life story, unique and riddled with experiences that no child should witness.

Through his story we understand his art.

Via a new documentary from independent London-based film studio DOGMA85 – ‘Blood, Paint & God’ – Machine, now 53 years old and a father to five children, revisits the locations of a past that he cannot forget, that pain him to remember, but a past which fueled and ultimately shaped his future as an artist.

Effectively raised in a generational trauma, Machine was left to forge his own escape through unwittingly cathartic, self-instilled processes of incessant classroom drawing which attempted to rationalize the horrors he witnessed. Unbeknownst to him, they laid the foundations for an artistic career that underpinned his rehabilitation and salvation in adulthood.

Sharing the memories that contextualise his immediately recognisable and confrontational artistic language of painting, poetry and prose, we follow Machine into his world of sailors, saloons and savagery – contemplating the criminality, faith, mental health, self-determination and survival that birthed a necessity for creative production, from within the eye of the storm.

My reaction to the violence and crime of my past shaped me both as a man and as an artist. The film forced me to relive the brutality and reaffirm my route out of it through art. – Joe Machine