Photograph taken by the author.
: “Back in August I wrote about a lot of online advice for artists is framed around the trappings of corporate capitalism, and my deep-felt aversion to the call to adopt these trappings in the documentation…”
The characters C. Auguste Dupin and Roderick Usher in a still from The Fall of the House of Usher. Source: Netflix
: “This blog post contains spoilers for the 2023 TV series The Fall of the House of Usher and probably for season 1 of the 2022 TV series Andor. The recent TV series The Fall of the House of Usher is a…”
Read the rest of “The stories we tell ourselves about the world are important”…
Previously unpublished shot from the series Study of a Figure in the Court of Queen Mab, part of the Acid Renaissance series, by the author.
: “As I continue with the final preparation for my Saints & Martyrs artwork (which I wrote about back in August), most of my thoughts have been about surrealism. Lee Miller: Dressed is an exhibition of…”
Vauxhall Bridge over the river Thames, with Aquarius House, St George Wharf, London. Photograph by the author.
: “This is a bit of a ramble, but bear with me. One of the main things I’ve tried to do with this new website — aside from making it load faster and look better — is to lay the foundations for a…”
Read the rest of “Standalone but interconnected, independent but not isolated”…
Some of the code behind this new site
: “As you may have noticed (unless you’re reading this post in an RSS feed reader, more on which later) I’ve just re-launched this website with a brand new paint job. Actually it’s a bit more than…”
Three life-drawings from last weekend. Model’s pronouns: they/them.
: “I managed to fit in a life-drawing session this past weekend, three drawings from it are displayed above. As you can probably tell, I was unsure of the best medium or style to work in that day, but…”
Read the rest of “September life-drawing: not safe for whose work?”…
No assembly instructions supplied, alas
: “I’m currently planning an Acid Renaissance photographic piece — working title: Saints & Martyrs — which is heavily inspired by the “catacomb saints” so wonderfully recorded by Paul Koudounaris…”
My studio (which is also my living room)
: “A lot of online advice for artists is framed around the trappings of corporate capitalism: building your brand, hitting self-imposed targets, maximising sales through targeted marketing, and so on. If…”
Detail from one of my test photographs taken on Friday 28th July
: “July was starting to look very sparse of any artwork until, I’m happy to report, the final weekend. On the final Friday of the month I took some test photos for a half-formed idea for a future photographic…”
Still from Michael Radford’s film version of George Orwell’s novel 1984
: “This blog post is mainly concerned with the overlapping and/or adjacent spheres of hauntology, folk horror, the weird/wyrd, and other related subject areas, but the conclusions can probably be expanded…”
Life-drawing from November 2022, pastel on black paper. Model’s pronouns: they/them.
: “I’ve been talking to my regular life-models about gender, particularly with the models who use they/them pronouns (who may be non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, or something else) and whether the…”
Read the rest of “The drawing is not the model: gender identity in life-drawing”…
Detail from A Haunting of Roses
: “A Haunting of Roses first appeared as a scribbled note in my notebooks sometime in early 2018. So the idea of a pale figure covered with dying roses and cobwebs has been a phantasmagorical apparition…”
Three of May’s life-drawings
: “Following on from April’s blog post on my life-drawing practice, I wanted to give a quick overview on what’s been happening in May (even though it’s not over yet, and I hope to get even more drawing…”
The Hastings Jack in the Green procession 2023 - photograph by author
: “For the first time since I moved down to the south coast I managed to get myself over to Hastings to watch the Jack in the Green festival, coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of it being revived -…”
Details from two of April’s life-drawings
: “I did two sessions of life-drawing this month, trying to find the media and style that I want to employ, and I think I’m nearly there. In this post I want to try to show how I assess the life-drawings…”
Detail from my photograph “The Historian” (2019)
: “A couple of comments over the past year-or-so have made me think about how I write here. Without going into too much detail the main thrust of the comments were that the posts weren’t written in the…”
Read the rest of “Writing as a Practitioner, not an Academic”…
One of the Life Drawings available from a drawing session in March 2023
: “I’ve decided to make three of my recent life-drawings, including the one illustrating this blog post, available to buy - you can find them on the new “Original Drawings” section of my online shop. This…”
Detail from the 2021 drawing Lamentation, by the author
: “Much has already been said about the championing of individualism over community by the likes of Thatcher and others from the 1980s onwards. It is — and continues to be — a weapon used to divide and…”
Scene from the final episode of Andor season 1. Source: Disney+
: “I’ve mentioned here before that back in the 1970s and 1980s there seemed to be a myriad of ideas about potential future societies in popular (mainstream/children’s television) science fiction: hallucinatory…”
Read the rest of “Radical futures re-emerging in mainstream science fiction”…
Cover of the 1828 volume of the British Almanac, used under license of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
: “Saturday 1st April 2013 On this day it is 373 years since THE DIGGERS moved onto wasteland at St George’s Hill, Surrey, and began to dig over the land and plant crops. Sunday 2nd April 2023 On this…”