The problem is I have a way of doing things, and that way has a name, it’s called "my life", and inside my life are the following:-

• Me
• People
• Other living creatures
• Emotions
• Dreams
• Objects
• Tasks
• Ideas

Everything else can be left to the side as far as I am concerned, if there is anything I have left out of this list and if there is, don’t remind me, I never was one for organizing, I rarely preside over let alone attend social gatherings in any form. I certainly could not be trusted to manage any form of business concern, unless you’re a masochistic manager who’d like to witness a small social revolution, if only to break the tedium and monotony of the working day. This statement in particular is not an over-exaggeration. On the occasions in my life I have been offered a promotion, it was for the main part due to my "trouble making", i.e encouraging a work force to think way way outside of the box, even to the degree of questioning why the hell they’d want to work for such a company in the first place?

I’ve never been good with time, it does have a habit of tripping me up at the most inopportune moments. My partner Christina has been steadily delegating more and more of her landscape architecture course work to me, essentially leaving piles of it on my desk, well I say desk, in fact it’s a laminated kitchen table with a wonky leg. Invariably each morning I am greeted by a plethora of Post-it notes and to-do lists, which are never satisfactorily completed. I’ve put my foot down a few times but I know how stressful Chris’s life can be (running a landscaping company) and how intolerant I can be of any form of stress that we have come to a strange and unspoken agreement. She does what she can and I do the rest.

Besides all of the above there are my own commitments, essentially I have just given up on a blog, a t-shirt reviews blog, it’s popularity grew too fast for my enthusiasm, and besides there is only so much one can say about t-shirts, however fanciful the design. Fortunately I have been offered a tidy sum to pass the reigns over and am i negotiations with an affluent chap by the name of Charlie and we speak. Saying that I’ve found myself with yet another blog in hand, i.e this one, something I had originally intended to proffer a few brief statements of intent in regards to each artwork as it appeared in the public forum. Yet again something that always happens to me is happening here. I do not like to be left feeling short-changed, I do not like to leave others in that unenviable state either, if you’ve bothered to come here to read my ramblings I should at the very least ramble with the best of them, offer myself up as a contender for great digressor, or something along those lines, because I do digress, habitually.

If there’s one thing I love to do it is fill the vacuum of a wasted life with the wanderings of an over-active and under-utilised mind, it’s what spurs me on to create, it essentially is the rock and a hard place of many creative beings, talk yourself to death or work yourself to death Doing both, let alone doing either will ensure an early grave I am sure of that, but in the short term, a more pertinent obstacle to life’s fulfilment, in whatever form one may assume it to be, is time. Something that no matter how much you may philosophize or spiritualize about, you will eventually be confronted with a clock, a mirror, a calendar or some other device that was no doubt invented to hurry you up and get you about your business. My business is perception, and the pitfall of my business is the perception of time and all that it entails.

If I spend too long perceiving the manifestations of time I achieve one of two things, the first is nothing at all, yes it may have involved an interesting excursion into the manifest psychology of man, or rather this man, but beyond that, there are no meat and bones on an experience. However many people tell you it’s the journey that counts, if you don’t have a photographic travelogue at hand, or a weighty report on the devastation of the over-populated regions of your under-utilised subconscious, no one will believe you. The other is a list, a list of achievements, or worse still, a to-do list and an over-inflated perception of what one individual can manage to cram into their life before it’s fateful end, illustrious or not, it will have a limit, and that limit is perceived in more than mere quantity of achievement unless one works on a purely materialistic agenda. No, the list remains beyond life, it is the all consuming fire that so many of us fear, it is the judgement by the harshest judge of all, not the supposed deity that so many in this world may still assume, whatever form it may take, controls one’s destiny, but oneself. I am my worst judge, be it for good or bad, if I think less of myself I raise the bar, a benchmark of impossibility, if I think more I do the same.

I have over-extended myself, my plans lay asunder, besides attempting to complete the Indoor Street Art print series I am planning to exhibit in Montreal this year as well as a number of other galleries that still lay on the cards, and with what you may ask? As of right now nothing. Paintings that have not been painted, on canvases that have not been stretched. On top of this the house lies in near ruins, the weather has been harsh this year, the sea’s salt has managed to tear off most of the paint from its rear, leaving it hanging like exterior white matt eczema. The front railings need repairs. The alley to the side of the house needs new gates. The basement needs another damp treatment. Besides which I have two art sites on the cards, ArtShout.net which I am hoping will offer free advertising to the arts community, plus Articstical.ly which I assume will be an arts community portal. Then there’s a fashion blog which a friend has convinced me I should contribute to, plus there’s a pile of installation works I must find the funds and time for if I am to ever exhibit beyond 2009.

But right at this moment I should be working on my 8th piece in the Indoor Street Art Series, I’ve attached some previews, it’s entitled "Spears of Destiny". I’m not a Britney fan, let’s get that straight, in fact I detest the world of mainstream pop for the main part, but what I have found particularly interesting about this subject is based upon my own experiences of mental health. The industry, the people, the corporate interests that drove this woman to the crazy house have swept the whole event under the carpet. However frightening that bald mad woman beating journalists with an umbrella may have appeared, she was the closest the public will ever get to seeing the person behind the celebrity. Fame in all it’s manifestations is mere armour. Something that can be pierced, extracted, appropriated, killed and even rejuvenated.

What you see now is not real, it’s the Prozac talking, Britney is a martyr unto herself and the unrealistic demands we as the public place upon "stars" and celebrities. She is no Joan of Arc for example, she has no message, as do almost all of those in the full glare of the media’s spotlight The famous are not people they are products, if the product is faulty we send it back to the manufacturers and it is either repaired or replaced. A product cannot declare war, start a revolution, reignite spiritual belief or tamper with the mechanics of power. It is simply consumed.

Britney is not a holy icon, nor a historical one, yet she will now continue to command the same attention in our immediate and short-term cultural view that any figure from the past could possibly achieve, and what’s more no war, no crusade, no enlightenment, no passage bar that that the A&R and PR people behind this "product" wish us to perceive will be recorded for posterity. Every product has a shelf-life, Britney has wasted precious marketing time and expenditure thinking, feeling and concluding that here life was meaningless. She has been burned at the stake of celebrity and has risen, phoenix-like from the fires of paparazzi hell to one again vend her pop fodder for a meaningless and emotionally stunted generation.

Deep breath. Calm down. Have a cup of tea. Ignore me everyone, I am just having one of those lives.

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To the Sickboy review… as SocialArrow.com - an up and coming social bookmarking haunt taht have described my work as Art 2.0 - I think it only fair I introduce you to a few other rising stars in the scene, artists with media savvy and a penchant for self-publicity, in touch with the cultural currents, the ebb and flow of social awareness and the globally informative news and information saturated reality of the "Now". So let’s start with Sickboy…

Sickboy harks from Bristol, and since the early part of the decade you’d be hard pressed to find a street corner or rubbish bin in the Bristol area that hadn’t been beautified with this artist’s unique and somewhat primal style. His work reveals references from many quarters, an economized faux-psychedelic undercurrent combined with a cartoon perspective on Indian, Islamic and Japanese art melds with bright plasticised colours that you’d more likely expect to see in a toy shop window at Christmas.

SB, from the moment he picked up his first spray can has continued almost obsessively with his trademark motif, yellow and red dome like temples, The colours are in fact a visual play on corporate insignia and branding, in particular the colours of the megacorp that is McDonald’s. Yet the translation to urban art and street culture is quite astounding, his reclamation of this overtly commercial pallete has opened up a new vista of down-to-earth philosophical debate. Why buy Happy Meals when life is still such a misery, why not feed the soul rather than the stomach? SB’s work is, as far as I am concerned, urban regeneration in its most raw state.

I personally believe the plasticity of his work references the corporate stranglehold on almost every part of our lives, a cheap and quick fix with highly negative and long-lasting consequences. We cannot rely on the wonders of mass production and Blue Chip focus group orientated advertising strategies. The problem with society is that we all agree as a collective that life must improve, it’s in a terrible state, and yet as individuals we find the task ahead daunting to say the least.

Sickboy, in his own inimitable yet highly effective way is doing just that, yes it’s only paint, it’s only colour, it’s only art, but art can be more than a decorative surface or messenger of dialectic medium for evolutionary change, it is change, however small the change may seem. The urban environment, in particular, is a depressing place for most of us to grow up in, or simply to grow. The majority of us do not live in an architectural dream of the future, we live here, in the midst of the decay and bureaucracy that enshrines our daily lives. So isn’t refreshing that a mere image, a simple design of colour and vibrancy, a moniker of hope can have such an enormous effect on our environment, or rather our perception of what could be rather than what is.

The world could do with a lot more temples of love, we have banks and corporate institutions, all of which could be considered temples of greed and avarice, churches of megalomania and infinite self-aggrandising ambition. I’m not proposing a yellow and red domed edifice on every corner, but perhaps a tree, a flowerbed, and piece of clear blue sky, even a smile and nod would do.

Hurry down to 100ArtWorks.com now to grab what you can of Sickboy’s highly collectible urban street artworks before it’s too late, half the collection is already sold out or reserved!  To see more of SB’s works visit his site at www.thesickboy.com

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When you’re young, no I’m not talking young at heart here, I’m talking real quantifiable time spent alive, most preferably on Earth. When you’re young there are moments when you may feel the world is your oyster. If it is, I’m glad for you, grab that pearl and run like the clappers, if you don’t the next scrap of a thing who passes by will nab the goodies and stick two fingers up at you as they fly by in their new limo, or rocket ship, or on the shoulders of their cheering entourage after topping the charts, or selling a winning pitch to a Hollywood player, or some such dumb luck story of fame and fortune.

Something you won’t want to do is think, I mean yes you should think, you should think hey I had better not step out into speeding traffic, or perhaps I won’t kick that generic authority figure in the family jewels. Just don’t think too long and too hard about anything and everything or you might just find yourself writing a similar blog post to this one in a few years from now.

I’ve tried or rather experimented with life, in between the stints at compulsive narcotic inebriation and philosophical discourse,. Over a decade ago I wrote a sci-fi script that was "almost" picked up by someone or other at Fox Searchlight. Unfortunately, for my bank balance and my early if not rather naïve ambitions for fame and glory there were two major stumbling blocks.

1) The script was overtly erotic - movie execs don’t like sex or at least not publicly - however abstract the context in which the act is placed.

2) The name of the film was "Milkman". Coincidentally the script for Kevin Costner’s awful Hollywood flop "The Postman" was doing the rounds at the same time. Now the two films couldn’t be further apart, I have never liked Costner, his drab and hackneyed approach to both acting and direction leaves me cold, however at least the public finally caught up with my opinion once they’d seen his trite attempt at a vision of the future.

Incidentally mine involved reducing men to cattle, they were held in enormous warehouses and their groins attached to pumps, their brains chemically induced into coma, and their "milk" was collected for a burgeoning sperm bank enterprise that satisfied women’s need to create life whilst avoiding the messy business of mixing with the male gender of the human species.

When decanting my life I can see the strings of disparate identities that now lay dormant in my wake and wonder who the hell those guys were, but I suppose with the benefit of hindsight and the mockery of a belief in the linear temporal construct I have the advantage over those poor fools. Another me, another Paul from the past decided he wanted to be a music producer, so he spent a year training to be just that at Point Blank, London. All he had to show for it was a room crammed with digital technology that was destined to be defunct within another year, a collection of temporary deadbeat friends with more money, or rather with parents with more money than sense, and of course, more memories. Oh so precious memories to add to the collection, the colourful threads that do weave my life’s tapestry so inexorably, so predictably I could die.

In between those periods of productivity have been a few regrettable careers, from factory worker to graphic designer and back again. I spent a day working at an abattoir, I was a vegetarian at the time; and when the head butcher, a De Niro/Taxi Driver style brute with blood-splattered machete in hand tore into the stomachs of a dead cow; hanging aloft from a rusty chain, before pointing at the nearby wheelbarrow, which supposedly I was meant to wheel under the gushing intestines and shovel in a spadeful at a time, I heaved, I wretched. I then disposed of the previous night’s Quorn and Soya before promptly walking out.

I’ve experienced a month of nervous breakdowns whilst attempting to keep pace with coke heads at a London magazine publishers, Haymarket Publishing in Lancaster Gate, a Heseltine consortium, a buzzing wasp’s nest of greed, avarice and low pay. I was supposed to sell space and on occasion help with the marketing for Campaign Magazine, a well known ad rag foisted upon unsuspecting MD’s and directors the length and breadth of Britain. I could never get my head around the fact that someone would spend thousands of pounds on a postage-stamp sized box at the back of a free publication, and I suspect mainly unread pile of glossy claptrap, but then again as my boss at the time said I was looking at it from an artist’s point of view, which for him was as distasteful as it gets.

I’ve spent a few years here and there in various loony bins, they too were an eye-opener, and perhaps contributed to the abandonment of all "Beta Paul’s", all of those whom have preceded me, this Paul, the 40 year old cynic of life, love and being in all its twists and turns of fate is most likely the Alpha.

I’m lucky in many ways, I create art, finally, I am free to do what gives me purpose on this planet, however little it may appear to me or you. I am with a woman I love. I have a decent place to live, unlike many of the hovels I have frequented in the past. I am coherent, my mind is just about intact, I am as yet not dying of any excruciating disease, although I wouldn’t be surprised if one is lurking around the corner in the next decade looking at my past consumptions. I am not totally bitter, I have the intelligence to reason my thought processes through most problems that life throws at me, I even have the energy to attempt to achieve what I want to in life.

But yes, I have left it very late, very very late. Perhaps I could consider my mind, my life’s experience, the events in all their ghastly and beautiful vision, an essential key to what I do now and how I do it. Then again I could be kidding myself, unless I change the world, for the better, in some miraculous way or other, I most probably am. I would describe myself as a human pressure-cooker, except this hotpot on the constant boil isn’t gunning for a fight, or willing everyone he meets to join his revolution, no, I am simply an artist. Creating images that put paid to the incongruencies, the contradictions that my media-fuelled, televisual, two-dimensional slipstream of a life has decided to place in my path.

I don’t believe in coincidence, I have met some who do, frighteningly illogical logical types, then there’s those who don’t, and they’re worse. Everything has a reason, if it’s not God it must be quantum physics or the result of some kind of failed random number experiment run by a secret government. My theory, if it can be given such a title, is rather more simple. I had made a decision, the moment I could think I must have made a choice, and from that choice, don’t ask me what, my memory is good but not godlike, whatever it was, it span off an immeasurable branching of other choices; decisions, reactions, conclusions, progressions and regressions. That first decision led me finally to the last, which involved staying up all night on the last day of my 39th year on this planet, waiting until 7am, and then proceeding to badger you with my most innermost thoughts.

My mother says I had tried to run away at around 9 months old, or rather crawl. A neighbour finally found me rolling around her garden, she lived four or five houses down from us, I had probably decided that she had had a better life than my painfully young (at the time) mother and father.

I was more decisive then than I am now. The moment i could drag myself along the ground I did it with gusto, I admire that first of all Paul’s, he never hesitated, he wanted an adventure and couldn’t be bothered to wait until he could walk. I’d advise all those under 40 to do the same, and even some of you who are older could give it a try too. It’s not too late, not unless you are dead.

Anyway, Happy New Year. Let’s hope so for all our sakes.

P.S I must be going senile already, I seem to have written this a full 24 hours before the event. Call it a reprieve if you will, quick someone drag me to the nearest den of inequity whilst I still have a drop of youth in my being…

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I was having a poke around Google, as you do, perusing the current world’s favourites for the search term "graffiti" and was rather miffed to see that for one, I’m nowhere to be seen, and secondly, and far more importantly, the top listing is still being hogged by GraffitiCreator.net.

Perhaps you’re a fan of the old school, the old old school, lost in an urban ghetto dream of block parties and tagging till there’s nothing left to tag but the back of your hand, but for me graffiti art never deserved closer scrutiny until it entered the fold of the intellectual, the avant-garde, even the futurist to some extent.

The truth is, no matter how much you might have a penchant for toons and typography, it isn’t art as we know it. The graffiti movement, teaming with crews battling to make their mark on the grimey underbelly of social infrastructure. The fact that it’s actually happening, that they’re doing it, that may be classed as art, something of an arts/social phenomenon. Though it must be clear to many that many of the individuals who make up this unmentionable movement, for the main part isn’t an artist. Graffiti is not a cerebral enquiry but an act borne out of pure frustration, a primal need to change one’s local environment, personalise it to reflect an emotional transience. The main source of their collective frustration being the dilution and dissolution of individuality and identity, a proposed conformity that has a precise and definite strangehold on the lives of so many people, young and old, in this world. The disenfranchised, the unheard and unheard of, will most likely never have their say in a public forum, and worst still many wouldn’t know what to say if they could. Anger can be as self-destructive as narcotics, depression, poverty, indifference, to name but a few of the alternatives to dealing with the cage that is our present mutual predicament.

Conformity is a sin, I’ll grant the angry taggers that much, a life isn’t worth living if it simply consists of diktats and perfunctory acts of obedience, passed top down from unseen echelons of power, yet in every act of socially collective rebellion there is always a sense of dutiful obedience to the "cause". Peer pressure and the desire for affirmation from one’s contemporaries, the need to be recognised by someone, anyone, within a selective mindset can result in as much a fascism of the mind, beneath the banner of another name, however intoxicating that banner may appear.

Stylistics are barely worth the effort if the message is one of vacuity, lines and colours do not form a masterpiece, not unless they really mean something, to someone, other than the person who created them. Graffiti, street art, tagging, stencilling, individually or as a crew can only make a lasting impression if the work breaches the traditions of self-aggrandisement, and even that can run thin when time is short and the law are pulling up for an inspection.

I had intended to steer this article towards a comparison between the traditional urban tagger and the newer breed of graffiti/graffiti visionary, and a similar divide between those who craft and those who create art. I’m well known for picking on craftspeople and I know I shouldn’t, it’s not fair to make such a generalisation, it could be due to the arts training I’ve received, the strict and almost compulsive teachings of a reasonably successful conceptual artist who found himself stuck in a teaching job with a grimace of desperation that would ensure that all who met him knew exactly what  he thought of them. I spent my late teens and early twenties immersed in a world of conceptualism, in a rarefied atmosphere of intellectual conflict and self-justification, I was taught how the artist no longer existed, anyone and everyone could create, the difference being only those with the discipline of forethought and the appropriately selective emotional detachment could separate the subjectivity of the craft from the objectivity of the artistic simulacrum. The act of creation is dualistically fired by the primitive instincts of the anima, and the objective goals of the intellectual ego.

Positioning oneself in the world of the arts, finding a footing in the culture that abounds, pinpointing the moment of clarity, tempering the juxtaposition of the self with the context of the age and a plethora of cultural phenomenon. leaves little room for the love of elaboration or a demonstrable over indulgence in the whims of cultural taste and fashion. "The New" is an ugly and malformed creature, it has no airs and graces, and cannot exist merely for the sake of its own survival, it must find its context within a long history of semantic debate and perceptual enquiry, it must compete with the "old guard" of notional values be they right or wrong, The future is where hope resides, it is an avenue of possibility, a corridor of unopened doors of unclarified intellectual enquiry and discourse held at arms length by the majority view and their suppressors and delegators of what can only be described as an acceptable truth, or a quantifiable presence.

Listen to my former newness, it is now old and forgotten, dishevelled and discarded like last season’s fashion faux-pas, yet I, as a physical being lay intellectually and emotionally dormant for many years, as many will do throughout their existence. However contentious the statement, the truth is we all reside somewhere far below our true potential, no matter the context, and we always will as long as we tolerate the "drag factor" of the lowest common denominator, culture is sick, it needs reviving, it needs to be taught harsh lessons and teach harsher ones. Symbolically we are at a crux in our civilisation, no partisan movement or theology can solve the quagmire of our own undoing, this is a collective plateau and it requires a collective response. it’s more than merely questioning authority that I propose as a vital component for the healthy evolution of both species and individual, it is the precept of reality itself.

I felt like a relative idiot back in the late eighties, I hadn’t read too many books, I simply liked drawing, I liked art, I didn’t really have a clue why, I didn’t think I would have to explain why, and then I found myself in a small white room filled with smirking old men who had been, seen, and done it all. I showed them my illustrations, a few paintings, some sketchbooks, and they frowned until the creases in their skin turned crimson. I rummaged around to see what else I could offer them, a glimpse into exactly why they should let me on their degree course when the head tutor reached in a pulled out a series of prints I had made the summer before. They were rather abstract, rather pop, rather graffiti in essence.

He asked what they were about, I have never stopped thinking, talking, or explaining since then, if I have the chance to spout I will, as time has passed everything I have ever thought has reached a new level of interconnectivity that firstly cannot be fully explained in words, and secondly forces me to purge and expunge through the medium of the visual arts.

The prints consisted of faces of a friend of mine at the time, Simon, a Californian staying with his nan in Eltham, South London, literally on the run from the law back home, it’s a long story, and you know how much I love long stories, so here goes…

Simon was a middle class lad from a leafier district of San Antonio, or was it Santa Fe, I cannot recall, what is important to note however is that he had fallen in with a bad crowd, his friends were dropping like flies all around him, an overdose here, a stint in "juvie" there, one after another the crew was literally shrinking day by day. He and his closest homies managed to pilfer a few bucks from their parents and decided on an all-night blow out, with fake ID’s in hand they slipped in and out of various local dives, one would pay the entrance, whilst the others would beat the alarm systems with baseball bats. The motley crew, the tatters of a brigade would then quietly proceed through the back corridors towards the bar and eye the heaving throng for dealers.

Simon was heavily into speed at the time, amphetamines, the poor man’s coke, he managed to score a small wrap, but it had been heavily sugared, it was more Pro-Plus than anything, and before long, he and his buddies had a collectively searing migraine coming on. Then an old waster stepped out of the darkest corner of the urinals and offered Simon’s best friend some PCP (Angel Dust). Simon warned him off but there was no stopping him, he was gagging for a fix of something, anything, and as he said at the time, but not in so many words "variety is the spice of life". A few more of the unholy teamsters slipped in on the grapevine, having tweaked that drugs were in the offing, and between them they finished the bag, like pigs at a trough, in mere minutes. Simon went back to the bar, he looked to young to serve, he sat down and nursed the empties of other revellers, and proceeded to grind his teeth for an hour.

A fight ensued, a creature with wild hair and crazy eyes was punching and kicking his way through a group of gangly looking goths, slam-dancing everyone and everything in sight, when he raised a chair in the air and threw it at the crowd the bouncers threw him out, his last words before hitting the exit head first were "Hey Simon, we’re leaving".

Simon stole a few half empty beers and a soft pack of Marlboro and sneaked them under his flak jacket as he sauntered after his mate, at a safe distance and a respectable rate, so as not to be noticed by the red faced security who were still busy cursing his friend. They had no money left, they had no ride, the crew had disbanded yet again, and so they walked, His friend performed impossible feats of strength on the way home, lifting cars and punching chunks from wood and brick. Unfortunately he’d also managed to smash a few knuckles ,the pulverised bone made Simon retch, but he kept it together. He knew he had to get the guy to E.R, he saw a late night cafe and placed him at the back with someone else’s cold coffee and told him to wait. The staff shrugged when he asked for a phone, he remembered seeing a call box near an empty taxi rank a few blocks back, he jogged there and called the operator, who passed him on to the local hospital, who must’ve informed the police.

When Simon finally returned to the greasy spoon there were blue and red lights flashing everywhere, he saw a pair of paramedics and a police officer fighting wth his friend, desperately trying to strap him down to the stretcher, his hands were bloodier, in fact it looked as if he had some fingers missing. The police were asking if anyone knew the madman, now screaming in the back of the ambulance, Simon was about to speak up when his friend, in an unexpected moment of lucidity frowned and shook his head and he mouthed the words "No Simon, they know about the drugs". Simon nodded and slipped back into the cafe, he sat at the table where he’d left his friend, a paramedic ran in, Simon looked at the table’s bloody surface, having first assumed it was smothered in ketchup stains he could see three fingers. He recognised the ring on the middle one, they were his friends fingers.

He never saw his friend again, a month or so later he received a letter, it stated that his friend had hung himself after being gang-raped, some of those who’d attacked him were guards, the police had started questioning the crew. They were focusing purely on a suspected PCP drug dealing ring, everyone had been implicated, the dealer said they were all his friends, no money had been exchanged. Simon’s mother panicked and sent him to Britain, he was shell-shocked, his dear old grandmother was oblivious to his past, and was rather pleased he’d managed to find a friend over here. We spent some years clubbing at the local punk and Goth hangouts in S.E. London at the time, as well as a few very late night Irish pubs who had a penchant for lock-ins when it took their fancy. Slowly I learned about his life, I wanted to commemorate his existence, his trial of life, and did so in the only way I knew how. Through artistic means. His life seemed like a prison for one so young. We experimented with a photocopier, his face and hands squashed against the glass, I mixed it with a series of screen-printed abstracts, the final results got me a place on my arts degree course a year later.

Simon had changed by then, he wore a suit, he worked as a trainee estate agent, he was going back to the states now he had turned 18, he said the trail on him had turned cold, he had finally learned to conform. I missed him but it was for the best. As I sat twelve months later in a studio at Brighton University (it was a polytechnic then), I recounted the tale, I justified my work, I was accepted into the fold. I had too conformed, I was an art student, an artist, art would make a decent human being out of me, it would channel my anger, it would change my perception, and in turn hopefully those around me. As time moved on I lost the passion, the vitality, the sheer insolence and arrogance needed to constantly fight my corner, to justify my life, my work, my art. I let the system beat me, I did what I was told, I designed graphics and websites for people I had no time for, dentists, bankers, retailers, franchise opportunities, I hated them and myself.

It was a long time before I found myself again, a few deep depressions and a couple of suicide attempts taught me that this was all there was, I either make the stand now or give up. Do what you want to do, what you need to do, if you are not the first then make it your own, life is in all its manifest spheres of influence and action, a forum of relative conformity. We are connected, we are as one, but we are not same, be thankful for your individuality and thrust it into the mists of what will come. Don’t tag, don’t tag along, challenge yourself and soon you’ll lbe doing the same for others. We are not here to be popular, we shouldn’t live for approval, we each have a destiny manifest, find it, nail it, and do it soon.

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I was shocked when I first visited Chris’s college campus, I was expecting something near ancient and religious in proportion, scale and design, instead I was confronted with a brown/grey brick affair, designed by a man who had made his name as a prison designer, and you could tell. The whole place was a rabbit warren of low ceilings, fluorescent lights, narrow slit windows reminiscent of arrow loops more fitting for several historic castles in the vicinity. Worse still each building was laid out as a mirror of the adjacent, as I hadn’t read the small white block capital text over the front entrance I lost at least an hour in a labyrinthine madness of my own making. Something I’m sure the architect had originally and deliberately intended to control the behaviour of prisoners in many of his previous designs.

I finally blamed the misconfiguration of everything in the building, from the position of the stairs and doors, to the placement of the windows, the seating arrangements, and even the view out of the slithered windows with some sort of temporary brain malfunction, it was my fault, I was simply suffering from a temporary insanity. I finally found the dining hall, I sat down and drank a lukewarm coffee-flavoured coffee and stared at all the unfamiliar faces as they rose and gradually departed the central auditorium (the only section of the building that afforded a view of the surrounding city). Then I looked up, there right above my head was a large plaque, an insignia with the word Rutherford College beneath it, named after the Nobel prize winning chemist Ernest Rutherford. I realised then and there I was in the wrong building.

I ran and ran until I finally escaped into a concrete plaza under a wet and cloudy sky, and searched for the Eliot College building, the building where I was supposed to meet Christina, the exact mirror of the Rutherford College building. Then I saw her, walking with slumped shoulders, looking rather dejected, almost shuffling towards the library. I shouted her name, the world stopped, no one shouted at Canterbury University, they were all model prisoners, Chris turned and smiled. We spoke briefly before she returned to her studies, I had missed an hour of my life, and wasted the same of hers.

That evening we talked about the experience, she recounted a similar one when she had first enrolled, a common one shared by many other students on campus. Then and there we coined a phrase, "The Rutherford Effect". You may have come across the phenomenon yourself, it usually occurs in badly designed modern architecture, drab and dreary Eastern European airports are another strong example of the temporary psychosis that can be induced by he same dark geometry, in fact all architecure of the Soviet era embodies the same purpose inherent in design. Control by confusion, subliminally disorientating in order to reduce the masses to a quivering and easily subjugated wreck.

Coincidence is a myth… sometimes you have to stop looking for the easy answers and swallow the hardest pill, there are good architects and bad architects, most of them are somewhere in between, they don’t mean to screw you up, it just happens sometimes, whilst others know fully well that what they’re involved in, something pernicious and perhaps evil, no matter how symbolic their interpretation of that term may be:-

The architectural design of the Louise Weiss Buillding, part of the EU Parliament’s complex built in Strasbourg in 1999 has been compared to The Tower of Babel - read Vigilant Citizen’s full exposition of the manifold and manifest conspiratorial elements associated with the choice of this design, the article’s way out there, but certainly an eye opener. From the reversed pentagram style of the stars featured in the EU’s flag to the comparisons made to the biblical references of Nimrod (a rather megalomaniac character) and a potential burgeoning New World Order.

The Denver International Airport.

Over the years several conspiracy theories regarding the airport’s design and construction have emerged. From the swastika layout of the runways to the Neo-Nazi murals painted in the baggage claim area, to irregularities with its construction such as the fact that every contractor was fired before completing their work. When you arrive there’s a statue of a terrifying horse with glowing red eyes, a commemorative capstone engraved with a Masonic symbol, stories of a secret military underground complexes with a vast network of unused tunnels.

Author Alex Christopher claims to have worked in some of these tunnels and has described what appears to be vast holding areas for prisoners, strange nausea-inducing electromagnetic forces, and caverns big enough to drive trucks through, presumably for potential terrorists of the future.

No matter what the reasoning behind all these disturbing features, it must be said that air travel, especially since 9/11 is paranoid enough without insane city planners throwing in their two bits worth.See more disturbing images of the airport, once again available at Vigilant Citizen.

Something else along the lines of evil architectural debate that caught my eye recently was an article at BoingBoing that literally states that Washington D.C itself is the work of satanic architects and city planners. According to the author Mark Frauenfelder, the whole layout is based upon a pentagram, which has particular Occult and Masonic associations, although I’m not sure if that particularly proves anything, I was surprised to read that John McCain, failed presidential candidate for the Republicans agrees with the idea, he’s called Washington "Satan’s City" at least twice on record, although this was actually referring to corporate practices rather than the strange layout of D.C.

On a more serious note I do believe in a world of ever increasing population growth and urbanisation, the architect and town planner’s roles must be scrutinised far more closely. The effects of the 1960s council high-rise tower block conurbations in Britain is just one example of how a community can be destroyed by bad architectural design, many of which have since been demolished, due to asbestos pollutants and other health and safety issues. Although I would suspect that crime, unemployment, lack of decent transport facilities, mental health issues, disenfranchisement and many other problems would have been contributory factors to their demise.

Corporations may spend far more on their architectural vision, however as George A. Romero points out at the end of the classic zombie flick "Dawn of The Dead", generations of lives have wasted their weekends, succumbed by the pleasures of exotic retail splendour, traipsing dark satanic malls in an endless cycle of pointless consumerism.

Bad architecture can literally breed psychosis, environment is a major contributor to the behaviour of a society - good or bad, it’s more than mere design, it’s actually a natural science. Neither architects nor their clients can ever fully comprehend the social effects, the psychological twists and turns, the final result of their brief, the random factor is always the same. People have one annoying trait as far as town planning wizards are concerned, and that’s individuality, something that cannot be costed or accounted for in a design. The next time you find yourself trapped in piece of evil architecture fight the urge to enter into a trance, head for the exit and take a breather. It’s a scary jungle out there, even if it is made out of concrete.

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No matter what you believe or don’t believe, no matter where you live, you can’t get away from it, and it’s here again. Even if you don’t want it to be. It’s that pagan winter festival conceived in order to cheer folk up in the midst of the shortest days and the longest nights. A time to get drunk and eat the remainder of the grain and smoked meat before hibernating like a bear until the sun rears it’s head again. It’s Xmas.

When the Christians took over, and redirected the celebrations towards their Saviour’s birth rather than the Winter Solstice, they did manage to hold on to the old Norse tradition of "Yule" as in yuletide, and even took Santa (orginally the Norse Goddess "Hertha") along for the ride. It’s funny how no one in the Bible or the New Testament celebrated the birth of their King of all Kings, still I’m sure they had their reasons, even though most of it was written many years after the event. December the 25th used to be the "birth day" of the sun-god, "Sol Invictus" or "Mithras" and  was actually the concluding day of the pagan winter festival called the "Saturnalia". Still I’m sure you don’t want to hear any of that, it’s Christmas after all.

Besides, something rather special is happening this year. Ever since the Coca Cola company stole Christmas away from all affiliated religious factions, and replaced it with a time for higher consumer spending, the rest of retail business followed suit, and we in the privileged West have ever since been digging ourselves into deeper and deeper debt with every generation. However, for a change, this year we can celebrate in frugality, we can buy nothing at all, and simply enjoy each other’s company. It doesn’t matter if you’re religious, I know i’m not, but I do believe that the world needs to take a day off now and again and learn to reflect, and this year we’re all going to have to do that. Many of us won’t have the distractions of all the latest gadgets or the opportunity to fly off to warmer climes, and even a popular ski resort is out of the question. Everything everywhere is far more expensive now, and the people of the world have really started to get the hang of this non-materialistic lark.

Shops are panicking, well obviously not the shops, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shop in panic, just the people in it. Usually those over-excited people in question are shoppers, but now it’s the retailers turn. They can slash their prices all they want but I feel a collective surge coming on, almost Marxist in flavour, hmm, tastes good. It means we’re forced to enjoy what we have, and who we’re with, and why we’re here. We are starting to talk again, the TV maybe on but it’s not a brand spanking new ginormous flat screen affair, and it isn’t hooked up to all the latest Wii games, it’s the same one we had last year, and all that’s on are repeats.

Conversation is starting to look a lot more attractive option too. Corporations don’t like conversations. Conversation results in the development of more informed minds, and informed minds like to discuss and debate, be it the pros and cons of retail conglomerates, or the failings of government, or the pointlessness of the latest ad campaign for some new fangled widget or other. People with time on their hands, people with accumulated feelings and thoughts gather memories of past interactions, and worst still, questions for those who bear down authority on their lives

These people are no good for the high street, they don’t fit the statistics of blue chip ad agencies, they don’t buy the latest "anything". In fact they use the old one, and keep using it, whatever it is, and if it breaks they try and repair it, and if they don’t know how they ask someone who does. Before you know it people are talking to all sorts of other people, sharing ideas, sharing skills, passing the time with more and more intellectual pursuits, striving to both understand and hopefully, finally, control their own destinies.

My Christmas isn’t religious, and it isn’t sold at the supermarket, my Christmas is sitting here at 5am and waiting for the hustle and bustle of commuter life to fill the street outside, to slam the doors of nearby houses and cars, to roar the engines for an early start so the boss will consider handing out a promotion, and yet it doesn’t, it stays slient, and the sun slowly rises, and all I hear is a faint dawn chorus and the tapping on my keyboard.

Rest you merry people, you need it, for soon we will all be fighting to survive again. The New Year may not be a happy one, but it will definitely be new, and far different than many before. Materialistically, we are all poorer now, yet now we are all communicating together, on a world wide scale, and that is worth more than anything on offer at the January sales. I have a feeling within another year we may find that we not only won’t look back, we will never want to again.

Peace to you all…

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Plus of course I have always admired the surreal quality of Cindy Sherman’s work, who alongside Andy Warhol has had a strong influence over the direction of my own art. In particular the appropriation of iconography from Hollywood, and darker side of fame, fantasy and celebrity in general. Diane Arbus has to be on my hot list, her work is haunting and at times dreamlike in its conception. She has had a great influence in film-making in the later part of the last century and even to this day. One of her most famous pieces, Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967 is so strikingly similar to the "dead twins" in Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of the Gothic horror novel The Shining, it’s almost insulting. I am sure the fact that it is also one of the ten most expensive photographs sold in history must offer some compensation, but sadly I doubt that Diane made more than a 100th of that price, if even that.

As you can tell it’s been a long time since I delved into the world of photography, which is why I was most gratified to have been invited to view a recent addition to the net at OneOfEditions.com conceived and managed (with a passion) by accomplished photographer Paul Avis. What particularly struck me about this collective of artists and their limited edition photographs was the subject and tone of the collection, a tour de force of suburban surrealism, a portfolio of deceptively subtle, moving, and sometimes disturbing works that have left me at times near agog with astonishment. Not only due to the sheer aplomb of their accomplished technical and artistic skill, or indeed the occasionally excruciatingly intimate, and at other times shockingly graphic imagery, but the mere fact that they have managed to capture their subjects, which would be for the most part barred from public view, has simply left me stunned.

I will feature some of the works here but I recommend you view the whole collection for yourself, I am sure you will be as amazed as I was.

Andrew Moxon is presently based in Gloucester UK, his works are hard hitting documentary-style photographs that centre around the rise in drug culture and the phenomenon of a burgeoning underclass and the aggressive and confrontational lives they must lead to survive in our present culture.

James Brittain’s photographic project "Collisions" expounds upon the cold beauty of technology, what simply astounds me is that he had access to the construction of components for the CERN nuclear research project in Switzerland. I am not a fan of machinery, and perhaps it is more due to the function of this feat of engineering than the actual form, however even I must admit the salubrious geometry of this "atom smasher" is indeed a sight to behold.

Clare Richardson offers an eye opening series of insightful photographs featuring an almost nostalgic yet somehow voyeuristic vision of the life of the agricultural worker. Her photos remind me much of my own childhod, right down to the colour process, and even the subjects seem somehow to be stuck in time, reminiscent of "hop picking holidays" in Kent for many working class Londoners of the past.

Rik Bower’s Blingers series of photographs mainly deal with the quasi-religious ceremony of the British Christmas, however I feel his work does more to serve a distance between the presented reality of the media and the unending mundanity of suburban life in Britain. When filtering the ordinary through the process of the image one is forced to consider what is the accepted norm of our age and culture, is there even such thing as ordinary any more?

Stephen Lewis presents a rather disturbing yet fascinating series of photographs that portray the process of cremation, removing the veil of religious belief and paraphenalia and replacing its icons with those of the every day, this particular image shows a peephole view of the cremation itself, voyeuristically shocking it lends itself to further metaphor. The idea that death is a taboo, the reduction of identity to chemical component, the elemental truths of mortality, the final end.

To view the rest of the collection of limited edition prints of these and many other artists visit  - OneOfEditions.com - many of the works are available at a standard dimension of 16 inches x 20 inches and limited to 50 of each image.

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I was born in an age of protest, people across the world were fighting for their inalienable human rights, democracy had finally grown a backbone. In 1968 America was in the midst of anti-Vietnam War protests, France was entering into its second Revolution in its turbulent and highly politicised history, a pitched battle ensued in Grosvenor Square London as student protests and "sit-ins" peppered the rest of Britain, Czechoslovakian workers rebelled against the tyranny of Stalin, Northern Ireland began to fight for its civil rights. Socialism and the unions in a plethora of states and countries began to fight for their last breath as a new wave of conservatism flooded Western politics. Whilst I, well I for the majority of the time lay sleeping, crying, drinking milk, eating Farley’s Rusks and uttering my first words.

As the 1970s passed before my eyes I watched Britain and my parents cope with deep recessions, strikes, fuel shortages, power cuts, social unrest, race wars, the death of the "hippy movement" and the rise of Punk, the collapse of centuries of tradition and a transfer of wealth from the artistocrats to the bankers and business tycoons. By the end of the decade Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government were elected and within a relatively short period of time Britain became unrecognisable.

"Old Labour" fought for the rights of the people under a socialist agenda, New Labour would begin to remove them. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world, we are watched wherever we go, we cannot gather in groups of more than a dozen without the risk of arrest under suspicions of incitement, we cannot even protest outside our own place of Government. All we can do is watch television, buy products, and try to earn money. The lottery has replaced religion, society is now a statistical ideology for the purposes of marketing and social control. We are at the end of our history, a small and petulant island on the verge of being swallowed by a Federal state, run by an unelected leader and an incompetent government, bullied by the greatest influx of petty and pernciious laws since lawmaking began. Yet we have no real legal representation, unless we are rich we can’t afford it, and if we could we most likely wouldn’t need it. The country is a slave of the corporate agenda, the corporations want nothing more than a sedate and subdued market, willing to accept the mass media at its word, willing to allow government to remove our human rights one by one, willing to serve as subjects to the state. We as a people are no longer angry, we are utterly depressed.

Bil and Ben depicts a group of police officers enforcing the will of the government, "The Old Bill" is a colloquial term derived from many sources, the Metropolitan Police have stated some of them here and The Guardian Newspaper refers to others here. Big Ben is actually the bell housed within the bell tower situated in the Houses of Parliament. The government are untouchable, they create laws as they choose, they simply serve the plutocracy. Many of the population are disenfranchised, should they wish to protest against the British Government, this would most likely be the scene they will have to confront.

Bill and Ben (44" x 55") by Paul Baines is now available as a limited edition print. To purchase this work please click the button below.

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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.

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Living in an oppressed and creatively diminished capitalist culture, there are few who dare to breach the unwritten code of culturally induced mind control, and some will always resort to their earliest memories of argumentative discourse. In my case, the most extreme will pour out their most subjective and highly personalised world views upon me, a majority being heavily influenced by the media, religion, politics, the very authoritarian constructs I bring into question with every work I produce. The view of the majority.

Others will resort to insult, glibly defensive remarks, sometimes abusive, mainly derogative, hoping in some way to rile their potential opponent. Both are, as I far as I can perceive, manifestations of projected personality. Using another individual as a focus for their own frustrations with their position in life, their cultural heritage, their understanding of the world, and their lack whereby most events that effect them are beyond their control. It is easier to target an individual than a state, it is simpler to blame the tangible than that which cannot be seen, heard or touched, for only those who represent the institution or body of power are manifest, and for the most part elevated beyond the reach of the common man. 

History does not record those who unquestioningly agree with the status quo, it does not relate the actions and thoughts of the subservient within the evolution of our cultural, scientific, technological, medical, political or artistic movements. Those who wish to remain where they are will be left behind, that is the nature of existence, that is exactly what the authoritarian relies upon. For those without power or influence to argue amongst themselves, and those with, to accept their payment, be it political influence, monetary gain, publicity, the gratuity, is as always the compensation for obedience to systematic control mechanisms established before history was even written. The pinnacle of influence is always mounted upon the empiricism of society, no matter what religion or political persuasion.

I create art to empower myself and others who feel the way I do, I do not create in order to destroy, what I dismantle is not real, what I deconstruct is purely myth. The schism of my own life has left me empowered with reason, whilst yet lacking in physical strength, influence in society, and financially secure. Art is my only home.

Secretly I’m what you might call a sensitive soul, an old fashioned creature somewhat out of place with the modern world, though over the years I’ve managed to build a psychological defence perimeter, an emotional blockade manned by pseudo personalities, armed with the weapons of cynicism and doubt, and blessed with the gifts of foresight and cultural perspective. There are most certainly some advantages that come with age, and for me, personally, one of front runners has to be the amassing of experience. A plethora of emotional exchanges and interactions, both positive and negative. Perhaps this is just one of many reasons that can provide some explanation if not currency for my rather skewed vision of the world; the distance I portray, as many of my art heroes have done in the past, including such characters as the infamous forerunner of Post Modernism himself Marcel Duchamp.

Unlike Andy Warhol who literally kept schtum throughout most of his career, Marcel was as vocal as the next guy, yet it was his work, or rather the actions that embodied his particular artistic communications that take centre stage in art history, rather than the pieces themselves, or to clarify further, the sheer audacity of his actions rather than the actions themselves. Fontaine his most infamous work is essentially a urinal, procured straight from the factory and signed by the factory worker who completed it, R. Mutt. The truth is it isn’t what it is that so upset the arts world at the time, but rather the outrageous belief that by simply placing a lavatory in a gallery Marcel had managed to undermine a vast and mostly ecclesiastical history of elevated thought and supposition in one fell swoop. The genius of the man has been vindicated over the years, in fact almost all post modern art must take some influence from the man who dared to question the autocracy of the arts establishment, and quite rightly, for without this one single action I doubt we’d have experience much more than the tinkering with traditional painting and sculpture offered by movement after movement, before and after Duchamp’s existence.

The gallery space alludes to provide a contextual framework whereby anything placed within or on its hallowed walls must be treated as something more than a collation of form and function, a conduit for expression, a referential medium for the exploration of perception versus meaning, a device or even an arena to simulate discourse and debate. What Duchamp did, what Warhol achieved, as have later artists such as Damien Hirst and even Banksy to a degree, is to force the public to ask the question, ‘what is art?" or rather "is this art?".

I have a confession to make, I am not a natural blogger, I am not a diarist, indeed during my college years I had hardly filled my sketchbooks before venturing forth into another project, I just did it. I used to talk until the cows came home, but more so I would expound upon an idea, a theme, a series of inquiries into anything from personal preference and taste in the arts, music, film, theatre, literature, to the essence of being, the dialect and didacticism of spirituality and religiosity. I’ve talked half a dozen people back out of a bad trip caused by a near lethal batch of strychnine-laced L.S.D, and even recaptured some of their "high" by the break of dawn. I’ve talked myself back off the edge of a cliff on one of those darkest of all dark days. I’ve talked to a blank wall in an empty room when a 17 year old friend of mine died of a brain tumour, it should have been God in there, but there was only silence, and as one rather trite commentator mentioned whilst attempting  to hijack my blog recently, yes silence can be a great comforter, it truly can provide solace. Talk, I’m afraid, is still cheap. Art takes far more effort.

The overtly religious, (or rather those that contact me), seem for the main part to have very little knowledge or perhaps even an intolerance of other faiths than their own. For those without a specific faith, we have to tolerate all of those who do. If I insisted that anyone who refused to wear red socks or a top hat was a blasphemer to my theoretical religion, based upon my own collection of hearsay and diatribe, what would the response be? Derision for the main part, if not even anger in certain circumstances. I neither have the time nor the inclination to respond to organised religious views as a debate for my work, I find the argument irrelevant. For those who have expressed fear of my love of silence, the comforting experience of absolutely nothing, the friendly void that consumes me at my most enlightened moments, I am sure you can find strong parallels in more Eastern religions, try Zen Buddhist philosophy for starters. Peace is a brother of silence.

I also receive offensive remarks, short and bitter rants constructed in order to rile me, to dissuade me from continuing with my work. I neither have the inclination nor the time nor the energy to debate highly subjective and overly personal abuse or veiled enquiry into what I do, why I do it, and how it makes others feel. I simply reassure myself, as those who have come before me, that if one is aiming for the vanguard of their remit, if they are achieving the results they desire, they will receive commentary, both positive and negative, in equal measure.

I write this blog to provide an insight into what I do, the answers are all there, if one takes the time to read what I have written, and forms a cogent argument, based upon an atavistic approach to our culture, our existence, our perception of the reality we communally interact within, I will engage.

Fortunately I have been approached by many with a far more positive and lucid vision of what I and many similar artists do. We are not in the business of pleasing the majority, we do not "craft", we are not here to provide visual pleasantries, but to inspire those who have doubts about the state of our society to question authority, the establishment, the political remit of the media, the bias of historical reportage, all under the banner of the empirical state of plutocracy. Furthermore, to question ourselves, our habitual thought patterns, our understanding and perception of reality as we see it, and the influence of those explorations upon our view of the world around us.

Currently I am in talks with various people in the arts industry regarding everything from interviews to collaborations to future exhibitions, all of which I am most grateful for. I have to maintain belief in what I do, in what I want to achieve, and I am beginning to understand that there are others who do feel the same. In years to come, if I am fortunate enough, I will be able to look upon this period as one of the most formative of my arts career. I accept that there will always be those who will fundamentally disagree with my stance, or my choice of subject matter, my approach to my work, or even my place in the field of arts. However, it is of great relief to me that there are an equal number of those, especially within the world of arts, who appreciate my work and take the time and effort to encourage me to push further into my own particular take on our global-media influenced culture. The debate will remain open, the theatre of indifference has been closed.

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