Not your usual Artsy Fartsy Nonesense x

The Age of The Charlatan ???

you know , I have tried to summarise our current times in a few glib notations before ...

I coined the notion of ' obsessive compulsive acquisition ' and I believe was the first to suggest that it was an inherently societal symptom ... one that would be extremely difficult to withdraw from !! and that from it the larger connotation of an actual epoch or identifiable age could be defined , but as what ?

the age of madness ....
the petroleum age .....
The Plastic Age ....
the age of the logo ....
the corporate age ....
the dawn of the ' brave new world ' .....
the age of the recreationalist ....
the age of celebrated and even rewarded mediocrity ....
the digital age .....

there are so many that are rather fitting , but don't quite encapsulate the full spectrum of complex interchanges and balances of cultural/ societal / economic and psychological trends that have become more and more apparent ... and personally I would consider far more concentrated in recent decades

' The Age of the Charlatan ' though , I think that might be the closest that I have come to covering all aspects of the spectrum ... for the sake of a loose overview anyway ....for now !!

coca cola , mcdonalds , the Disney company , 20th century fox , bbc ' news' , Donald Trump ( although as a notion anything since Nixon fits here ) Monsanto , Theresa May ...... and every tier of the echelon and hierarchy above and below these obvious pinion points

it just kind of speaks for itself ...... no wonder they tried to stuff that ' keep calm and carry on ' crap down our throats ..... and it seems to have worked !!! we have all been totally sucker punched by the over paid and under talented charlatans of this world ..... and its definitely well overdue for an overhaul x

Drawn to the Valley 2017 ..... pffft ,I am the Valley !!!

' Maker Evening of It' IMPROMPTU AUGUST 2017

Please Note that due to unprecedented demand the Shibari evening sip and sketch on the Saturday 19th is now fully booked , but don't worry , I have had a little word with the models and we will do a reprise on Tuesday the 22nd ..... get in touch if you want to come along x x x

yet another .....Work in Progress x

I have only just been made aware of the work of Lucien Clergue ... and well what could I say!! some of the mans work is fantastic !! I am in the middle of a body of works ( extended from the 'mythology' series from a few years ago )  that are due to be exhibited this coming autumn .... but such is life , I think I am going to have to run a little homage style study in parallel now as well .

start with a little sketch

then develop and refine the sketch where appropriate

you can just about see that I have marked this out in a grid for a simple relay of the original patternwork or grain

a few more embellishments

add a little tone

add a little extra depth

ink out for final template use

I will be working on a series of parallels and the finished works will be able to be viewed in conjunction with the ' Mythology revisited ' exhibition  this coming Autumn

in the meantime keep an eye out through your local gallery distributers and fine art stockists !

Notes from the field ....June 2017

so' whats on my mind ?' you may well ask facebook !!

The End of the Tour ! ...maybe of all things ??!!

that has been another freaking gargantuan undertaking completed then ! I have spent the last little while meeting quite a variety of souls, in quite a variety of places, discussing all manner of interesting and engaging subjects, and today is the last day ! and upon reflection I am quickly reminded as to why I simultaneously love and hate the public !

and it seems fitting , today of all days !!

I will write this and I will post it today !! the day of the election , and regardless of the result , or which way your poor sorry chewed up brain convinced you to vote in any of these recent fiascos... I wish all of us the very best of luck x

the general election ! called by the party that said there wouldn't be a snap general election during the brexit negotiation period , which again was instigated by that same party ! and all of the media are in favour of this particular party ( I was at a train station earlier today and the headlines on all of the so called news papers was absolutely bewildering ) and are drivelling the most imbecilic gibberish I have ever seen so flagrantly unanimous across all of the publications !! oh and this particular party is not only under investigation for electoral fraud from the last election they were ' voted ' in ! and to top all of that off , the company that ' works ' at counting the votes is a blatant and publicly known tory donor and beneficiary ???

so go ahead and vote, I will be so stunned to my core if corbyn wins ! really I hope that he does ! and then all the rest of your dreams come true , not only do we end up with a labour party that will send tony blair to den hague, shake up the so called unions and clear all of the back benches of the dreadful offal that is still left lingering as large parts of this opposition .... lets not forget that we are still dealing with , by and large ... tony blairs ' new labour ' an animal that definitely needs to be destroyed  ... corbyn is a nice front man .. he makes a lot of sense and his policies are actually seemingly sensible ...but there is still the whole festering rest of the party to sort out!!!

so what do you do on a day such as this , as a resident of no countries , or two or three .... I forget ! ?

I think that personally , Instead of filling the ballots boxes with easily dismissible and misplacable data, recording you as eligible to vote ergo a fixed address and as such more than likely some form of suitably remunerated for menial labours of some such or other, easily taxed , easily herded , easily predictable , easily dupable ....

I thought that instead of artificially stimulating a voting record that, prior to this particular little media circus and the brexit one that preceded it, had reached an all time low !! and as such dubious in its credibility of the label ' democracy ' at all ! if we had all done exactly what we have been doing before ...then the whole thing would have lost its whole legitimacy, the voter turnout over the past few elections has been disastrous!! if it had carried on with such a ridiculous participation record then , all its authority would have simply been removed by default !!

thus and subsequently, perhaps at least being able to trigger some sort of instigative change ! actual change ....to have emancipated us from this ghastly two horse race that seems to have served a handful of lazy manipulative liars very well indeed for a handful of generations and the greed seems to have been bred in intergenerationally, but alas no ...now we are looking at a population so frenzied on the idea of exercising their ' right ' to vote, so riled up and aggravated and divided over , brexit ! this election , local elections !! its appears to take on the same form of mania that sport fanatics are so often enthralled by !

so in a world that is clearly quite , quite mad !! blatantly laughing , naked except for a pair of pink bunny ears ,whilst sat in the mud  ....stark raving mad !!

I think I am going to do something ... maybe the only sensible thing left to a sensible human .... I am going to cancel a few days work !! I am gong to spend afternoon smoking joints and watching star wars ...

and then this evening I am going to fly , once again to Amsterdam !! because you people are all fuckin nuts x

A country of shopkeepers ... and a Yossarian in a world full of Colonel Cathcarts

I would like to take a minute to just talk about absurdities ......

I have spent a little while of the last little while having a little re appraise of a few scenarios that have become even more apparent to me than they had before .... and they have certainly been very prevalent for the last decade or two

I am sure that it was Napoleon who was quoted as saying that the English population is nothing more than a nation of store clerks and shopkeepers , and I think he was really onto something !

over the past couple of months I have been wandering around the southwest counties of the U.K ( my home land if ever there was one ) and it just makes me so depressed as to warrant these little digital tirades, so here is another one for your opinionless review !!

so what would be so bad if the appraisal was correct ? what is so wrong with a population of people that just want to do anything for an easy life , that just want to tend things and make do ....

well unfortunately there are many things wrong with this .....

there are many things that cross my mind when I have to engage with the public to make a living out of what I do and the English are a bizarre little crowd amid the international scene that is for sure ! here the premise of serfdom was never really eradicated

some observations of which I have written about in previous digital diary entries, but are just so confounding as to keep resurfacing ....consistently !!!

you see over the past decades I have had to incorporate many skills into my portfolio in order to maintain any semblance of a portfolio at all ! I had to work in offices,factories,building sites, political and academic hierarchies, tiny little local shops and great big monolithic market places and distribution points, tiny little seaside galleries and great big oil company owned and tax sponsored super galleries ....

I worked in and for some of the largest companies in the world, and indeed some of the smallest too, this has often arisen so that I could afford various investments into my own company and project interests, to buy materials for the ongoing designs and pictorials, framing those renderings, promoting those renderings,distributing those renderings, and quite often I have had to actually personally and single headedly build the damn gallery in the first place! often with the added incumbents of having no time and less money to attempt to accomplish these things!  and  from this I have engaged with a wider cross section of the electorate than would have been opportune for many out there in the so called labour market !

it really does depress and sadden me when I consider the range of perpetual mistakes that have led us all to this stage, a stage where small and independent producers and retailers are on their last legs due to the festering breeding of corporate interests, filled to the brim with what I have come to know , identify and despise as the percentage people ! a time when the genuinely visionary, the genuinely talented , the genuinely resourceful, genuinely productive and innovative are completely sidelined for the sake of that mediocrity which is incubated under spotlights for the enhanced and bloated accruements of the percentage people ! unless of course it can be suitably owned or manipulated to garner some percentage for the terminally lazy and perpetually entitled ! and on top there is the incessant nepotisms that just seem to arise from any human social groups !

in the last 17 years + I have seen many changes within the cities and the rural communities alike across multiple vocational and social disciplines, and I was a relatively observant child ( part of the symptoms induced by the creative tendency by which I have always been afflicted ) so I saw the perpetration of these things since the days of thatcher and the seemingly compounding effect that these installed and successive psychologies have had.....and there is so much worthy of comment that often my thoughts concerning these matters can become a little fuddled, and well as far as enunciating these overlapping concepts ....especially in the perpetual state of transience that I have found myself to be subject to, can leave a few little grammatical oversights .still not to be deterred I have managed to garner the notion that when I do engage with the public at various exhibitions, public appearances  and interfaces ..... that I am not simply insane and that through methodical conversation with even the most ardent, mob minded , media flooded heavily manipulated fool .....that there is some validity to these precepts and concepts of mine. so doggedly on we go.

now people have mistaken me for a complete capitalist, largely because when I present myself in a well presented space with shiny laminate floors and spotlights, big expensive frames and prices to match .... it is an easy mistake to make ! here is a guy that seemingly likes to sit sipping coffee and doodling pictues of naked women and nonsensical spirals for a living, of course I can understand and often have to self justify from that position( how can I continue to justify sitting and rendering fanciful things to adorn someone's walls simply for the sake of aesthetics) ... to charge people or barter with people who hate their jobs, and more often as not their lives ( because they have lived through the same madnesses that I have witnessed, and were tricked into the trap of assigning huge proportions of their lives to the affording and being able to afford such a basic necessity as suitable shelter ) many become bitter and a little twisted over the premise ....and of course I can see why ! and even how that happens!

other people will mistake me for a communist because I think that the distribution of resources should be geared towards those who actually, tactfully render an economic value from the resources they might have at their disposal ! which is why I designed the green star house in the first place ! I never thought to myself ' hey I can sell these things to people who can afford to buy parcels of land, they can pay large fees for something I designed .....simply for the fact that it needed to be designed !'and when showcasing these designs I am hailed as some kind of mad idealist for saying and demonstrating that if the individuals personal spatial allocations were allowed to incorporate a means of production without the need for immediate commercial growth,or maybe even any commercial growth ! then innovation would lay waste to boredom and the need to buy a bigger corner sofa and we might actually be able to garner a creative tendency through the application of favourable labours. as opposed to the meaningless ones the current labour market are assigned in the name of ' worthwhile vocation '

Some people ( and thankfully this would be the larger portion of the people that I meet ) are not so far gone in their mania as to be beyond reason, and can be coaxed through a series of rationalities as to be able to end up actually agreeing with the principles even if they cant find a means to be able to agree with me personally , but I do consider both to be small victories in a weird kind of way !even if they don't generate sales at the point of contact ..... really I don't think that is what the work is about ! at all !


so you can all pigeon hole yourselves off onto these isolationist descriptions .... I really don't care what meme or newspaper article convinced you of your political allegiances....

go off and be a communist if you like, claim to the world for all to hear that you are a socialist, capitalist, anarchist  ,nihilist .....buy into whatever brand you think helps define you as a progressive and modern human ....

but know that you are still buying into a brand .....a brand of separatist ' ists ' I can tolerate the ravings of most lunatics , so long as they aren't interrupting the very origin of the ist .....the Artist, the creator, the instigator , the organizer , the producer or the trains of thought that inspire such!

You see the Artist was the ist before ists became a thing .... the first cave paintings and idol carvings were not subject to the defining notions of something as restrictive as isms and ists, they were created for the same reason I have done and continue to do my work , and the reason that those expressions have become so diverse in themselves .... I like most humans have the capacity to create ... to render to figuratively conceptualize notions, thoughts and feelings through artistic expression and creative tendency, and in many ways it is the most therapeutic and soul enriching ' pastime that a person can do .... to take nothing a blank cave wall , canvas or scrap of paper or lump of clay or wood ,in a tumultuous and turbulent world of sheer chaos and to assign some kind of order to that,that blank nothingness, and the whole mess of emotions that is the human experience and to render something that records even a split seconds worth of that existence. it is often said among my arty friends that if they didn't create by music , or dance , or image or written word ...if they were somehow left unable to deal with the great complexity of life by having this little integral and personal yet publicly viewable outlet of personal expression , that they would simply go insane , this is a notion that I can absolutely relate too ! So we have all of these creative types staving off the uncertainties of a confusing and confounding  existence through these manifestations , all of which reassert the sense of ' self ', not to mention the implications of the formulation of divinity and eventually organized religion based on some of these unexplained phenomenon, (its very easy to see through this chain of thought how a creative individual under the influence of some ceremonial hallucinogen could easily personify a means  of having contact with some deity or other )

there are certain activities that have been able to fortify the human condition and all of our questions about existence in general , a person can walk ! just that ! to simply propel oneself across the surrounding terrains by means of self propulsion ..... this has always been beneficial to human , because it cements a physical being in a physical environment .... existence must be a thing if I can touch and walk over those hills and mountains that I previously only saw from a distance, along the way you will encounter little experiences,( see animals amid their habitat, get a stone in your shoe , fall in love , or maybe a hole ) all of these will deliver a sense of existence as you pass the miles that separated you from that thing in the distance ...and then well, you will actually get there , and you will see first hand the place that you set out from is indeed a different place to the one you arrived at ....and all the places on the way were different too .... so if nothing else you can be sure that the places are real and physical places , and in turn you must be a real and physical entity within that environment to have been able to have engaged with it in the way that rendered the experience !!

in the same way , growing crops / flowers / tending animals and manipulating landscapes does all of this too ....if we take a very basic and simplified notion of the hunter gatherer : there were no crops , a desolate empty expanse of land and an ongoing state of hunger and isolation , after successive wanderings you had managed to physically engage with your environment and bring back seeds you had never seen before , with a physical interaction with your current reality the moving of earth , the furrowing of the land, the tending to the evidence of prosperous life developing before your own very eyes .... all based on the notion that you or the mountains might not actually exist any way in a unforgiving and unyielding landscape ..... you saw the plants and animals along the walk to the mountain remember , and you must have said at some point , if I exist because I can engage with this environment, and the environment exists , because I can engage with it, if I can get a stone in my shoe , or see a variety of flowers bloom in this place that I have never seen bloom anywhere else .... then maybe I can pick up the seed pods of that flower , and take it to the point of my original departure .... because I exist and the landscape exists , these seeds flowers and animals all exist, then I can personally carry these seeds / animals back to that original point of departure, I can have an influence here, and experience, and as the flowers begin to grow in places that they did not before, as you relate to / with domesticated animals and beings also engaging with this construct of reality that you are managing to forge out of this crazy existence full of uncertainty and cruelty and lack and abundance...this blank canvas is suddenly filling with ratifications

and this is what the original ists were about and up to ... they were asserting themselves in a world and an existence that offered no certainties ..... they were claiming the self, and that is kind of what we have lost , in so many facets of our lives

we are no longer able to just freely define ourselves , or our environments , or our lives , or personas .... we have run out of blank cave wall , there are no more mountains to walk too and even the ones that are there , blocked off by highways and gateways and rules for admittance usually with an applicable administration fee....or even as with mount Everest lately a queue to get to the top, with admission procedures that have to be adhered to ....we have become completely disconnected from our world ,ourselves and each other !

so shopkeepers are really a damaged breed of adventurer , of assertions that formulate a very important sense of self ! in order to be able to get the relevant permissions and pay the applicable fees to get to the top of Everest, these shopkeepers must get their produce, not through production or manifestation , they must pay the original producer a smaller amount as they can , then they must charge the customer as much as they can , so they can sit in a state of purchasable existence, depending how good they are at ripping off both the producer and the customer will depend on how much of a purchasable existence they can ' afford ' and all of it at someone else's expense....this is how you end up with a supermarket culture, with virtual experiences taking the place of actual physical, existence justifying experiences, this is how we can end up with the nixons and the thatchers and yes even the Donald trumps of this world in charge of nations mcdonalds and Monsanto feeding or starving populations, mote insurance salesmen than farmers  .....and the farce continues, we are indeed in an age of chaos , of mass delusion and insanity, the problem is that we have intergenerationally insulated it so well that it actually carries itself off as perfectly fine , perfectly normal;

Well just like the main character in one of my favourite works of literatute ( Joseph Hellers Catch 22) I don't want to fly any more bombing runs !! I don't want Colonel Cathcart sat in a state of populace worrying about parades when the whole front line is being decimated by an enemy, I have done my 50 missions and it was 50 missions too many , before I saw sad self perpetuating truth of the thing .... stuff just costs too much !! be that quantified as revenue , or man hours , or the incessant destruction we wreak on the planet , and other cultures for the sake of some fat well fed , perfectly comfortable recreationalist version of an existence .... I have tried all sides of this coin , but the whole thing is minted out of shit , by lazy liars and thieves ... that don't really care about anything but securing their small percentage , so that they might continue to ' live ' in the state of so called convenience !

I have said over and over again , that without galleries there would still be artists, but without artists there would be no galleries , just a little food for thought !

Upcoming .....onto the river Fal , Falmouth, Truro and yonder

The Arts Hole On Tour / The Arts Hole Afloat ....invading the south west coast in 2017 keep an eye! if you take a little scroll down the right hand column you will find a few examples of the architectural and design elements of this exhibition, and if you take a little scroll down the left hand column you will find a few examples of the ' signature paintings ' all intermingled with a few of the published cartoons and sketchbook pages now known as ' 101 reasons to choose a vocation in the creative industries ' ... or ' 101 Reasons...'  for short, as well as a few little behind the scenes photos, old reviews and other little bits and pieces!! Keep up with the ongoing ODDyssey by following the usual digital representations that everyone seems to waste a hell of a lot of time on these days x x x

Falmouth early May 2017

Truro Early May 2017

Penzance Mid May 2017

St Ives End of May 2017

and then,a little time off?? or carry on with this pursuit of yonder ? ..... decisions ,decisions ....

... a quick stop in Fowey !!

Fowey and Polruan sit either side of a rather meandering estuary

these are strange places .... Fowey is really rather nice and they are connected by a rather quant little ferry ...

but for me Polruan would be for Fowey what Torpoint is for Plymouth .... kind of a strange underfunded suburb of its counterpart ....

it always seems rather overcast and grey when I am in Polruan ... and yet I always manage to catch Fowey in the sunshine ...

It does have to be remarked upon though .... the last time I passed through here was actually about 8 years ago .... there are definitely some places that are harder hit than others by these ever stranger days ! and I am sure that there used to be a lot more local art around here than there is these days !

Mevagissey

this is another wonderful little Cornish village typicality

there is just enough character left here to induce the feeling of being in the 17th century ....

the art scene here is rather bustling and the little markets and stalls that can often be found are a wonderful little eclectic mix but as with so many things down in these counties ... maybe a little isolated ! there are several community initiatives in outlying areas around here but if things carry on the way they have the last decade or so ... ??

unfortunately I have not really had much time to indulge in the local tourist feeling at all of the stops on this little floating/ rambling tour , but I will definitely be coming back this way to explore a little more ... apparently there is even an aquarium ... but that will have to wait for another time x