islands

a professor once told me that the only thing worst than a bad painting is a big bad painting. thats a pretty good observation i think.

outdated

i often try and draw maps from memory. it's a good mental exercise and i enjoy being able to track how my geographic knowledge has changed.

a small joy is looking at an old map that shows countries that no longer exist. the solviet union, east germany, pre-1948 maps that show palestine and not israel, yugoslavia, the congo section of africa. finding a map from a country that reflects a bias on a contested territory is rarely experienced but coveted joy. i saw an argentinian map here in london that listed the falkland islands as the maldives.

print

printing is as simple or complex a process as you want it to be. with me its just an extension of my drawings that i can do at home. i enjoy the repetitive and methodical act of carving and the ability to create multiple of an image is great from my work.

printing, especially on the small scale is an excellent combination of the human and mechanical. the original drawings is human, the the carving and printing process is mechanical, then as you alter the printed image you make it human again. the physicality of printing like this is also refreshing as the digital age, as great as it is, moves further and further away from these techniques.

i am a sucker for the cult of personality. joseph beuys was rescued by the tatar people after his plane was shot down in ww2 and saved only by the animal fat they wrapped him in. picasso, when he was still young and known as pablito, carried a pistol in his belt to prove his manliness. royal tenenbaum died while rescuing his family from a sinking battleship.

all i can say is that if i get alzhiemers when i am older, i hope my family reminds me of the great things i did in my life... like when i ruled circumnavigated the globe in my handglider and when i took vladamir putin to 11 rounds in the middleweight championship but had to which draw because of an open facial wound. those will all be good times.

neon

this is a a scene from a titian painting.

i am a big fan of yellow highlighter. its glows and is difficult to look at, which makes me think that had it been invented when religious art ruled, celestial figures would have neon yellow halos instead of gold. its relatively recent invention emphasises the contemporary. it's radioactive.

it should be said that it is amazingly ugly and kitchy, but that also has a certain appeal.

no title

the book format is appealing because people are comfortable with books. flipping a page creates an implied narrative that i can exploit or manipulate. its also convenient and inexpensive, something paramount to my practice. i like the fact that books are often expected to be practice works, but rarely a final piece. that low-browness is nice.

this is a drawing of the back of my eyelid.

song: santogold- i'm a lady (diplo mix featuring amanda blank)

airplanes

airplanes v cars

cars are far more deadly than airplanes but we still fear driving less than we do flying. a reason that i often hear is that we are not in control when we fly but i am not sure being killed by someone else is less terrifying that being killed by a decision you make yourself. i think it might be an instinctual reaction against something very unnatural. human are not supposed to fly and when you think about it a planes is many thousands of pounds of metal being held in the air only because it is traveling hundreds of miles an hour. at least a steal ship in the middle of the ocean can remain afloat when it sits still. maybe its the prospect of being killed in mass. when a plane goes down hundreds go down with it. however, a bus carries large quantities of people and those go down as well.

with an airplane and the right resources there is nowhere on the planet you can't reach within a day. this only became a reality within the last 30 years. thats an amazing reality when you consider how many empires, nations and wars were built and fought around the ability to clear a mountain range or cross an ocean.

golden udder

ghosts

burkas

nuns

udders

a woman came into the shop where i work and said she was painting gorillas. when she left i tried to draw a gorilla from memory. the ghost suited figure wears a gold face because he is important.

a ghost of a deceased person is visiting a fruiting tree. I have been burying a lot of things in recent drawings. dead people, treasure, gold and oil are often found underground.

speech bubbles are a new interest. you can play with whats inside, where it comes from and to whom it is directed. they are useful because its a symbol that we all know how to interact with. i often leave them blank because like most of the stuff we say, its not really important.

The bricks are like the grass I often paint. I enjoy the repetition and the subtle changes in the watercolor.

i lucked out because i have access to highly discounted Lascaux paints. the gouache line is particularly satisfying. they operate somewhere between acrylic and watercolors.

one reason i like repetition is that when an image appears in multiples you can compare it, notice similarities or differences. sometimes there is just power in numbers.

living in London I have learned to appreciate a long line. one should expect to wait in a line to do almost anything in this city. londoners also like getting explicit directions from overhead speakers. the joke is that the english would have made excellent communists.

the golden udder. this reminds me of something from an old myth. i imagine walking into a cave and the entire ceiling being covered by radiating golden udders. if you flip this drawing over they turn into golden burkas.

the beginning

i want to share a few of my drawings and some thoughts.

sometimes the things i draw seem to come out easily. well, its always easy to draw something but sometimes interesting ideas come out from the beginning. i remember drawing this shortly after eating breakfast when we were staying with Philip. i suppose it was a good day when you get a humalope shooting angry bees out of its anus. i like this drawing the narrative grows the longer i look at it.

visual diagrams trying to help explain things interest me. as i grow older i notice that diagrams get more and more complicated until the diagram needs a smaller diagram to explain it. sometimes its really nice to look at an image intended to make you understand something but you know you aren't getting the intended message. in these situations i enjoy applying the meaningless graphic to an idea or problem i have been dealing with.