Paul Watson’s notes on ongoing artwork, giving an insight into the creative process.
As per last week’s post, this post is a series of minor updates - a format I’m experimenting with, more like a newsletter with various bits and pieces. This week’s artwork I spent yesterday on life-drawing and photography, that has resulted in two new Acid Renaissance prints available…
Read the rest of “Acid Renaissance updates and work-in-progress”…
This post is a series of minor updates as I’m trying to make best use of my new work-life regime (3-days a week doing my day-job, 2 days dedicated to artwork, and a 2 day weekend of relaxing, contemplating, and tidying up), and that includes blogging a bit more often. I’ll still do the occasional…
Read the rest of “Some updates: refuturing, life-drawing, etc”…
Back in the 1970s there seemed to be such a myriad of ideas about potential shared futures, exploring all aspects of the political, social, and cultural. The aim of neoliberal capitalism of the 1980s onwards was, and still is, to close down all these possibilities - as someone (Fredric Jameson?…
There is a great power in a deliberate temporal dissonance that stops you in your tracks and forces you to reassess. The TV series Britannia did it wonderfully, combining Celts and Romans with psychedelic rock (and so I’m delighted that it will be back for a second series, and if we don’t…
I've been thinking recently about how artists (and musicians and writers) use social media, about how nearly every “how to use social media as an artist/writer/etc” article talks about your “brand” and finding your “market”, framing everything in the perspective of neoliberal capitalism. It’s…
As work steps up on my new series of artwork, Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced, it’s about time I provided an update on the ideas and thinking behind it. First of all, Acid Renaissance is not a fantasy series. It certainly borrows quite a few tropes from popular fantasy…
It seems appropriate, announcing that The Children of Winter is the first piece of artwork in my new Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced series, that I am coming down with a bad cold. In No one dreams of England’s future any more I promised a vision of a radically-imagined…
I have, of late, been wittering on about radical visions of the future. It started in November with No one dreams of England’s future any more, and then The Ghosts of Christmas Futures which was followed the next day by a bit of Twitter fun called The Collective Imagined Future England where…
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As an experiment I asked the following question on Twitter: Right: you are all characters/professions/creatures in my vision of a post-apocalyptic England after the Dark Dream has come, where a new society is slowly being built that is a strange mix of pastoral and future-modern. So what…
2018 has been my most financially successful year as an artist, primarily due to my England's Dark Dreaming book (fewer than 75 copies left at time of writing!). However when I say my most financially successful year as an artist please don't even think that I’m anywhere near close to being…