time to_war.

In time to_war. (2025), digital artist ScribblyJoe captures the instant before everything changes. A single hand hovers over a red button, its gesture poised somewhere between command and surrender. Above it, a figure—half human, half machine—breathes through a gas mask that gleams with iridescent blues, magentas, and greens. Around the head, smoke curls into amorphous clouds, suggesting both atmosphere and consequence.

It’s a deceptively quiet image. Nothing explodes, and yet the moment vibrates with tension—the familiar, dreadful anticipation that comes before impact.

Created in Procreate, time to_war. exists in a world where illustration meets emotional reportage. ScribblyJoe’s style is loose, gestural, and impulsive; brushstrokes remain visible, colours bleed across contours, and linework flickers between precision and chaos. Though entirely digital, the work feels tactile—its texture recalling charcoal or pastel on heavy paper.

The palette oscillates between muted olive greys and jolts of neon. The background’s subdued green evokes military camouflage, while the mask’s electric hues pull the image toward the surreal. This collision of tones embodies the artist’s central tension: beauty and horror sharing the same visual space.

The gas mask is a familiar relic of survival and fear. Here, it serves as both armour and erasure. It protects the wearer but obscures identity, turning the figure into a universal operator—a person without personhood. The red button below becomes the axis of decision, both literal and symbolic. It recalls Cold War iconography and video game mechanics alike: the power to end the world reduced to a simple interface.

In ScribblyJoe’s hands, these symbols feel disturbingly contemporary. They speak to a time when war is no longer waged face-to-face but via code, drones, and distant commands. The title’s syntax—time to_war.—with its underscore and final period, reads like a line of code, an execution command. The war begins not with battle cries, but with keystrokes.

ScribblyJoe’s practice sits within a broader current of Australian digital art that interrogates technology’s moral dimension. While many of their contemporaries explore identity or landscape through digital media, time to_war.confronts the ethical vacuum left by automation and detachment.

In this context, the gas mask becomes a metaphor for modern subjectivity: the filtered self, mediated by screens, algorithms, and protective narratives. The figure’s obscured face suggests that accountability, too, is masked. The work reflects a world where destruction can be executed at a distance—cleanly, efficiently, without the mess of proximity.

There’s an intentional strangeness to time to_war. that situates it within a surrealist lineage. The exaggerated proportions, floating hand, and dreamlike vapour recall the psychological spaces of artists such as Max Ernst or more recent digital surrealists. Yet ScribblyJoe’s surrealism is not escapist—it’s diagnostic. It mirrors the absurdity of contemporary reality, where apocalyptic potential is managed through corporate interfaces and everyday technology.

The smoke that drifts through the composition acts as a visual metaphor for uncertainty. It blurs boundaries, softens edges, and diffuses clarity. Within this fog, moral distinctions—between right and wrong, safety and danger—also dissolve.

What makes time to_war. so compelling is its quietness. There’s no spectacle, no explosion. The artist captures the instant before action, exposing decision as the true site of violence. The muted gesture of pressing the button becomes a psychological portrait of obedience and inevitability.

This stillness also implicates the viewer. By observing the scene, we occupy the same moral threshold as the figure. Would we press the button? Or are we already pressing it—through passivity, consumption, or our dependence on systems that obscure consequence? ScribblyJoe transforms the act of looking into an act of participation.

time to_war. offers a mirror to our digitised anxieties. It asks what remains of human emotion when decision-making is automated, when destruction becomes aesthetic, and when ethics are outsourced to technology. By using a digital medium to question digital morality, ScribblyJoe turns the very tools of creation into instruments of critique.

This work does not simply illustrate the threat of war—it performs its logic. It’s as though the image itself is about to detonate, its colour and form held in suspended collapse. Through painterly spontaneity and technological precision, ScribblyJoe crafts a haunting parable for our times: beauty at the brink, the human filtered through circuitry, and the terrible quiet before the click.

- Critical Analysis by ChatGPT