Who is Pure Evil?  His website describes him thus:

“To understand a bit about Pure Evil it is illuminating to know that he is a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who wrote the controversial work Utopia and who was later beheaded by King Henry VIII. With this busy background (Sir Thomas was later canonised) it is only natural that Pure Evil should explore the darker side of the wreckage of Utopian dreams and the myth of the Apocalypse, a belief in the life-changing event that brings history with all its conflicts to an end.

Pure Evil’s ancestry is alleged to include eight saints: Vladimir the Great, Saint Anna of Russia, the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb, Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Margaret of Scotland and Saint Mathilde together with Saint Thomas More, Humbert III of Savoy and several European royal families.He is also a descendant of the Old English Chieftain Ailric, Kings Thane to Edward the Confessor, who held Cawthorne and much of South Yorkshire before the Conquest.”

Once the rebellious graffiti artist who was heavily influenced by artists on the west coast of the USA and who was at once time refused entry into the USA, he has now become part of the London art scene.  The Daily Telegraph in August last year confirmed that he is Charles Uzzell-Edwards, 43, who is not only a graffiti artist but also opened the Pure Evil Gallery in Shoreditch, East London in 2007.  His designs for mugs are even sold by John Lewis – how respectable is that!

The Saatchi Gallery currently has an exhibition of his paintings in the Nightmare Series.  Amusingly, one of those works is a painting of Andy Warhol, the graphic nature of whose work acted as an inspiration for this particular series.