Some points of seperation

By way of an apology

I am plagued by dreams of you who I do not know. I fight you, one of you I throw like a doll and an old, wasted, bitter sofa I once found in a skip in Clapham catches fire, released at last from its mediocrity. I wander about alone and mumble love for those closest, making a prayer against the pain that I cause. I try to choke it up like I did to rid myself of a broken heart and you come in poisoned because of the space between us that my pictures have seen.

Cutting off my nose...

I have a limp administered by my own bite. I have an awkward twisted fulcrum that tips me, biting down on principal, finite bipedal means to articulate an ease that I might otherwise enjoy in life.

Mr Peel recalls National service days

To complicate matters still further, while John was in basic training, his commanding officer happened to be going out with his stepsister (his parents having divorced when he was about sixteen and settled down in new circumstances): 'He was enough of a prick that when I met him at home I was obliged to call him "sir",' he fumed in later life. 'I've often hoped that one of these days I'll find him in flames at the side of the road, begging me to piss on it to put it out, and I shall say, "No, no. You carry on," and pass by on the other side.' - from 'A life in music.'

Dis-orientation

'I wander out into the hall expecting to see someone. It turns out it wasn't anybody: it was a machine. I'm as crazy as a loon: I'm invited out to dinner. I keep telling myself: Before you go to bed, be sure to close the bathroom door; if you don't, you'll just have to get up and close it later. We are going stupidly to places we have never been. Going away from home, sometimes lost, we come by circle, home again. We're surprised: it's changed. Did it slip-out from under us? The day in the woods I took a compass was the day I got lost for sure. Two years later when I was throwing it out, a child to whom I'd given a bass drum asked whether he might also have the compass. The first thing she said was: "Everyone's confused; there isn't anyone now who isn't confused." Or was that the first thing she said?' - John Cage

The lab (ora) tory

For the love of God

Freedom

Removal man

Scatter in substitution and deterioration, derail, off-load and elevate.

Another hand

....

And then and then...

and then.

I found this grain of sand and read this inscription

And now, is it all about God? Is it that we don't celebrate together enough or that we never really wanted to anyway? What are we afraid of? I take a swipe, a snarling teeth snap at misunderstood movement in the dark and I take chunks out of my foot, my sister, my brother, my father, my mother. We must be together in the dark. 'Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and consider myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.' - oh Hamlet. Give yourself up to the joy of battle, the equinimity with all life to find the infinite grace and power in all things outside ourselves, a communion with and a commute to the great hilarity. Lets share bunks drunk on this barge on which we all awake, stink, shit, dance, hide, imbibe, wank, fuck, feed and learn to swim where we'll all fuck each other over in the end when we've burnt the last mast. Make good while it lasts the best of us. The rest? They're in hell already, you minion fucks. Yes, man is the choice maker and I choose to love because I know how sweet hate tastes. I have fillings.

070705

I was due in London on the day of the bombings. I was late for my train. With the events unfolding I took my thoughts for a ride on my bike and tried to get some fix on things, some kind of centrepoint to make a sense out of slaughter. You can't of course so I reached for brevity, keeping my mouth shut, not thinking at all. Cycling through a graveyard I saw this young Alsation bounding across the grass and through the stones with an agility at odds with the apparatus that she was bound to. The young dogs back legs were paralysed but she was unimpeaded, smiling as only a dog can. She was hope.

Girl stabs girl in Stevenage

In a town not too far away from here two school girls argued over a boy. One of the girls stabbed the other, a fifteen year old, with a kitchen knife, a blade one presumes she just happened to have with her.

To be heard...

...better whilst sitting.

Painting

My response to a sketch may be a poorer child. It is nevertheless a child and must be loved dutifully in all its Platonic geometry. Actually size for size there is in my mind no question as to which one I prefer but its crude dispensation of the raw finds a virtue in four foot by four.

Sketch

It frustrates me that my sketches are always the image, what I'm aiming for and not the response to them; see 'Painting' above. As an unspoken rule I rarely go down this route but this time I have. It's the science of the matter that each new discovery creates problems somewhere else. And so it goes...

From the well

This is a purification of the above two images in the sense that I'm, was marking towards a certain truth that I cannot articulate too well, a truth of an involuntary turning away from fundamental supporting walls of life, of myself. I have been a dutiful prophet of my own destruction, I grabbbbbed the bank and I have been hauling myself out of a janus faced river of excess. I am wiser for it but God, as it is said, makes work for idle hands.

The economy...

...of an explosion without waste.

Life during nights interval

Around us always and inscribed upon the most unimaginable circumference this great metabolism.

Rain on a table

I took this picture of my silhouette reflected in the sodden surface of an old sun table during a storm. I can remember looking at the rolling clouds above and feeling as if I was treading in an emotional gravy, wading through more than my emotions alone. I paddle as best I can in this electric sea.

I can only hope.

I can only hope today that all the lost return to those who love them.
I can only hope that those responsible will be brought to justice.
I can only hope that this doesn't happen again.
I can only hope that good comes from bad.

It's so easy to hate.

(Pointed sticks)

Trees

Trees bare down to our very roots. We tear at them like the child tests a parent seeking the violence of seperation, ripping at our veins and wounding ourselves with the indelible pain of matricide.

Que se jais

My attempts to give meaning to images that I've made in response to curious questions have left me short. Oil on canvas, four feet by four feet (That's ten toes altogether and enough to balance on, more than some.) I need to find words for this. Do I? I must, I'd be as a fool to inarticulate. What reason needs a child? What reason needs a picture? What are the parameters of my responsibility? Quieten history, quieten the voices.

All of us

Travelling through a graveyard a year or two ago I heard a chorus of birds gathering themselves to pull off across the globe, following gravitational instinct and the knowledge of genetic history. It struck me as I heard their polyphonic song how the utterence of all living things are one, even with a mouth full of noodles.

Kevin and an advice object

I spent an afternoon with my friend Kevin whilst he ran around Soho pulling strings and in the instance about which this sketchbook clasps, Kevin seeks advice from his friend Igor. Igor, as I recall waxed wise lyricism over the carefully rendered contours of hats.

It's been some time...

...since I last attached something to this tiny fragment of net-space. I've been tied up with a painting. Today all that matters is that another atrocity has occured. London gets bombed and no surprise. Only last time I was on the tube I felt myself close in, feeling as you do sometimes on an aircraft when you realise that you are truly at the mercy of all things outside of your control. All I can say is that I am so sad for all those that could be any of us. I am so sad that this also happens every single day in Iraq, thousands upon thousands of innocents caught up in the shrapnel of fanatical resistence. We each and every one of us has this one responsiblity and it is to get on with our lives without blame, without revenge in our hearts and to follow the best of what that tiny and profoundly important organ can offer.