Paul Watson’s notes on ongoing artwork, giving an insight into the creative process.
Following on from April’s blog post, lockdown continues to force my Acid Renaissance series of artwork into different directions. Photography has been temporarily abandoned, as has in-person life-drawing. Instead I’m currently concentrating on drawing using photographs of life-models (or…
Read the rest of “Acid Renaissance update: The Oracle and the Sexton”…
eBay Experiment The drawers in my plan chest are full, I’ve run out of space to store artwork and a plan chest drawer filled to the top with stacked paper is surprisingly heavy - just opening and closing a drawer is starting to become heavy exercise. So, as an experiment, I’ve put…
My plan for December 2019 and the first three months of 2020 was to take Acid Renaissance into new territory. It would be brighter and more hopeful, and start to signal some potential radical futures. Sometimes, though, things just don’t turn out how you expect. Instead there emerged a…
The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced everyone that you only get one chance to improve society every five years. Didn’t succeed this time? You’ll have to wait another five years before you can try again - that’s the rules. The way to start to change…
Read the rest of “Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral”…
I’m going to be returning to talking about art and all the related stuff I usually talk about in the next few weeks, but until then I wanted to post a few pictures from another walk. In some ways these walks are related to my art practice, serving as one of many sources of inspiration - my…
Yesterday Kate and I took the 77 bus from Brighton Station up to Devil’s Dyke. This bus only runs on weekends and public holidays and takes about 20 minutes to get out to Devil’s Dyke, stopping right outside the pub of the same name. £5 return fare per person. Click any of the photos…
I’ve lifted the term “post-apocalyptic pastoral” from a book review by Goodreads user Terry from Toronto who effectively seeded my reading list by citing Richard Jefferies’ After London: or, Wild England (1885), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), Richard Cowper’s The Road To Corlay (1978),…
Read the rest of “Post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial”…
“The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression,…
Bacchanalia Beneath the Wind Turbines is the latest piece in my Acid Renaissance series of artwork. It’s a drawing made in Sanguine pencil (and some white pencil) measuring 760mm × 560mm, and yes, in terms of medium and lighting it’s unlike the previous pieces of artwork in this series.…
“If living in a new weird ontology is the only way for people to keep living, what do we want to keep of ourselves?” — Elvia Wilk, Toward a Theory of the New Weird This single sentence has been reverberating around my head all morning. It describes one of the underlying themes…