Paul Watson’s notes on ongoing artwork, giving an insight into the creative process.
I’ve run a mailing list/newsletter for this website since … possibly as far back as the late 1990s. Sometimes I’ve been good at sending out stuff, but more recently I’ve been very bad. I sent one out in February 2019 then nothing. Well, nothing until now. I’ve decided to revamp…
Although I only posted this photograph on my site and social media yesterday, it was actually taken at a photoshoot back in the autumn of 2020, in the window between the first and second Covid lockdowns in the UK. The original idea for Our Lady of the Orchard dates back further - the earliest…
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who…
Read the rest of “Is it easier to end capitalism than to imagine the end of capitalism?”…
My creativity and inspiration have been very limited of late. Sometimes this just happens, and at other times there’s a definite correlation with what’s going on in the world. In this particular case I strongly suspect the latter. While we’re certainly not suffering anywhere near the…
Read the rest of “Diggers, Moss, and Bacon: a round-up for February”…
I’m a visual artist, so this brief piece about Mark Fisher’s draft introduction to his planned book Acid Communism (sadly never to be realised due to his premature death) examines the concept from an artist’s perspective. As an immediate warning to the curious, I want to make clear that…
I wrote about the first drawing in this series-inside-a-series back in early August, and I wrote about some of the props and references later that month. Since then I’ve finished the second and third drawings in the arc. The next drawing, Study of a Figure in the Court of Queen…
Read the rest of “First three studies from the Court of Queen Mab”…
A couple of weeks ago in my last blogpost I wrote about my plan to make a number of Studies from the Court of Queen Mab, which will form an arc or mini-series as part of my Acid Renaissance series, and introduced the first drawing from this arc. This drawing, like the others I am planning,…
My original plan was a very large scale, multi-figure, drawing of the Court of Queen Mab, but I simply don’t have the room - I’d need a large studio space to attempt something like that. So instead my amended plan is to make five or seven “Studies from the Court of Queen Mab”, which…
The images above are taken from flood.firetree.net and show the islands of Great Britain and Ireland at current sea level, at a 40m rise in sea level, and at a 60m rise in sea level, dramatically changing the shape of the islands as well as significantly reducing their land mass. Even a modest…
As the third national lockdown in England doesn’t look like it will be a short one, I’ve been making some plans on how to continue my artistic practice under the restrictions. The vast majority of my artwork comes from working with life-models, either through drawing or photography. I…