I was recently asked in an interview about my artists bio ....
do I even have one ? .... jeeezus hundereds of em , I have been doing this mad stint of accidentially boderline controversial shit for over 20 years now , I have been the proprieter of just as many gallery spaces and have written all manner of gibberish in all manner of languages ... for all of them !
the original Bio : bravado really ! it had to be I was basically field testing one of the first pop up principles ... ever !! I had a tiny space in a tiny seaside village, that through a series of forcefully bent loopholes I managed to get use of for a little pop up gallery, so I set to work and filled the thing , from cheerful seaside daubs - to what has evolved into the ' signature series ' of watercolour works ( one of the things I am ' best known ' for ) a little something for everybody , and indeed anybody ....
seething confrontations and foreign adventures all embodied in the work I embellished on the property I was using ' formed a ' brand ' the arts hole , (whch I swiftly rendered as an original and copyrighted piece of original artwork : which is now the ' logo ' ) ..... blah blah blah ,'' quite honestly when people would people would wander in , initially I confessed to being the producer of all of the work present, but this used to confound the ' usual art buyer ' .... so eventually I moved to explaining different styles away under different guises, my first website , I think that was ' theartshole.co.uk ' was produced by a friend of mine , and it was great we took the piratical / smuggler type history of the place and really rolled it into the brand , and the website looked really nice and was full of written content ... I do still have the hardcopy notes somewhere and so will maybe oneday get around to putting that original format up somewhere .. just for prosterity !!?
so Artsist satements a plenty ... and descriptions and values ascribed to all !
then I wanted to refit a shitty old wharehouse on the edge of Plymouth city to opperate as an art gallery and architectural showcase ... I think at this stage we took down the old website and redid the whole nline thing ... I think this was ' Art By Valerio .com ' and this was a hell of a thing , there were write ups for the ' pop up gallery ' there was a running commentary on the progress of the workshop and workspaces , we did write ups for all of the psudonymns and all of the work styles , the design portfolio ... its was huge and the artists state ment ... around this time was about rejueneating the decaying urban landscape in order to make it economically viable for a more sustainable and progressive future ... and I ended up in an 18 month legal battle , again with plenty of written content !
scroll on a few years and I threw some stuff at the royal academy summer exhibition , I carried it up on the train , enormous and pre glazed as it needed to be ... wrote a very compelling truth about the work and my process , only to have one piece stolen and the other refused ! later I sent them some crap ... some real crap and of course they displayed it without question ??!!
I got myself a little yacht and filled it with paintings and had a go at sailing around the southwest again just running out the format for the pop up initiative, really the boat was too small , and I too inexperienced a sailor ... initially at least , so it was hard going in the little westerly 22
myself and my first wife decided that Amsterdam held far better prospects for us , than these continual unecessary trials in the completely unforgiving and hostile environment that the U.K had become
The Arts Hole International Pop up initiative beame a legitimate thing , I ran the gallery in much the same way as I had previously , I was in an antikraak property , i was subletting from two studemts ? I doubt I had a relevent permission to trade from a residential property ? but I needed an income .... so I converted the groundfloor into a little gallery and workshop, it was a lot of fun , I had totally lost fiath in the idea that a website , or etsy or any of that rubbish was going to be better at relaying product , than actual line of sight product procuring 3 dimensional individuals, and was mainly relying on the blog and funnily enough , online dating platforms as a reasonable and rather lucrative means of free online advertising , so just stuck with that
Then the U.K ... well David Cameron did a very stupid thing ! ( now lets just put this flat and straight! I am / was pro remain in the union !!?? that does not outright state ... that I approve of the Union ..in its present format )
my u.k interests ( cargo containners full of original handrendered and heartfeltly crafted items of artwork and sentiment) lost a great deal of value .... my wife buggered off to india ..... and ironically enough ( and yes I can see the hmour in it ) the Gallery space in Amsterdam was squatted by refugees , while I was back in the u.k doing a build a dinosaur workshop for children in london ! .... that had had been prebooked prior to brexit , and was now worth a hell of a lot less because of brexit ....
I did a couple of little pop ups across the u.k and europe, under the guise of '' Brexit Refugee'' before heaing back to the u.k , swapping a painting for a 10 meter yacht, and resuming ' The never ending tour '
then In light of all of the mad speculative legislation that surrounding the brexit fiasco , I went and gave heart to a beautiful Slovakian Girl that was living here in the u.k ..... just , well maybe not just , to see how this unfurling ....what a nightmare !!
I took on another pop up space in the city of plymouth and declared war on the authorities that had not only given me such a hard time prior to my departure .. but were also , presumanly the same administrative block that were ushering in this Brexit nonesense !!
between spraypainting the city at night and sneaking away to weeklong art expeditions in order to maintain , this crazy little brand that I have managed to cobble together , which has in the face of every adverity I have had to encounter , one way or another has always been my saving grace ... the wife walks out , you find yourself penniless in a country where you dont know anyone ? paint something ... I have always got a swifter return on that than sending out c.v's for weeks
god only knows how .... but just prior to the lockdown I was in a bizzarre situation, and that is what has led me to the current set of circumstances !
..... I should have made a run for prtugal !!! '
