As a former boss of a veiled religious cult once told me, as I sat in a Bristol warehouse in the early 90s, piecing together cheap and gaudy crystal jewellery for a gullible New Age catalogue company, "Paul… Ideas are cheap". Until now I had never fully comprehended the far reaching scope of that short and glib statement. Ideas, or rather the formulation of them, has always provided me with a constant source of joy and revelation. The pleasure of combining notions of belief and the belief in logic, emotional resonance with a conundrum of human behaviourisms, the mysteries of everything that constitutes our brief, but for the most part eventful lives on this planet, however humble the example.

Each individual experience of being, being here to be precise, or even more precisely here and now, is a metaphorical jigsaw waiting to be completed, be it by purpose, emotional attachment, or overwhelming magnitude of event. Each age of man is but a formula of interaction and incursion, conflict and resolution, regression and progression, seeking a commodifiable if not ultimate solution to the quandaries, qualms and queries of a generation. Each act of creativity is but an undiscovered journey, for some the descriptive tenet might be "the soul". For those more inclined to the irreligious, a simple path of higher and perhaps profound logic, leading one from the "A" of doubt and insecurity, through the "B" of enquiry and contemplation, to the "C" of understanding and if one is lucky, wisdom over mere knowledge.

However, for many the harsh realities of life, between distraction and dispersion from all quarters, be it peer pressure, media manipulation, or any contributory factor that may wallow in our cultural and intellectual melting pot, our vast aggregate of instinctively driven and fervoured beings, there is an undiscovered region in the dark depths of both the collective and the individual’s psyche, a misunderstanding that may and for many always will lay dormant in the subconscious.

Life is painful, it’s meant to be, without a broad spectrum of negative experience the palour of interpretative thought and emotional enquiry remains grey and unformed, malleable yet unable to hold shape, no matter how simplistic the form. A contrast of dark and light endows each and everyone of us with comparative balance, a relativity of thought vital to the progression of any life or act, however inconsequential it may seem in the greater context of this vast universe.

I’ve been journeying through my own personal wormhole these last few weeks, after the initial euphoria of forming an idea in my mind, a vision of what was to be, I’ve then been faced with the intrinsically dogmatic endeavours that face all artists, traversing from concept to form. Visions are all very well, but practicalities of reality have never been my forte, and on this occasion the exceptions were as usual, few and far between. There has been little here within the confines of my unique obsession to comfort me through my own process of creation, I follow a well-trodden route watching from the sidelines as I set my body in motion, removing myself from the security of the familiar, the nourishment of conversation, the immediate feedback loop of pleasure, or even the most basic requirements of the human physiology.

Time has as usual been slipstreaming through my busy fingers, the numbers rolling by incoherently as my persistence of thought and focus bares down on my hand, laying stroke after stroke of colour, hue and tone. Life has sped up around me, and on the few occasions I have met with some form of meaningful interaction, I have been unduly distracted, pulled almost magnetically, back to the drawing board, to my latest piece in the Indoor Street Art series.

I have finally completed my 7th work in this collection, and with some relief, yet without the elation that many a layman may expect, I present to you "Bill and Ben", a highly if not over-illustrative enquiry into the "state of the state" here in the sceptic isles that constitute Great Britain (a misnomer if ever there was one). The work features a storm of British police officers engaged in the intense duty of crowd control, truncheons at the ready, defending the bastion of government. This piece has emerged as a personal allegory of my own plight as an artist, my goals, my perceptions, and my intentions for the future. A fight between the rights of the individual and the over burgeoning demands of an increasingly intolerant legion of bureaucracy of identity.

The police are but a tool of the government, and the government in turn are nothing more than lapdogs of an increasingly right-wing politically corrupt plutocracy, whilst I am a mere statistic in their game of dark number, I am also a slave to my art. It is both my a protective ideology and a means to an end, a subjugation of the individual, in this case this individual, must give way to the bigger picture. A creative mind must, at certain times in its evolution, dispense with notions of emotional identity, personal wants and whims, needs and desires, in order to reinvent oneself as a device for the completion of one’s own machinations of the imagination.

The police, or as many Londoners and British at large refer to as "The Old Bill", will on close inspection retain an appearance of individuality, but step back and at once they form a mass, a collective of an ideal of an interpretation of order and control, or the sake of the health of a principal, a theology of state identity. Ben, Big Ben, a recognisable landmark the world over, is in fact the bell contained within the tower, the spire that overshadows our Houses of Parliament, the seat of British government, the meeting place of this kingdom’s representatives of the people. Led by an unelected leader, held deep in discussion and debate, planning the future of our population as they spend our wealth accrued. Armed only with the notion of "wise elders", proffering a higher accountancy for the serfdom which is this lowly isle.

This work – Bill and Ben – will be available as a limited edition of 100 prints, in various sizes (up to 44" x 55") within one week.

This post is tagged Bill and Ben, British Government, conflict and resolution, contemplation, conundrum, emotional resonance, facism, harsh realities, identity, insecurity, media manipulation, police state, realities of life, religious cult, The Old Bill