My plans for 2024

I deliberately skipped the archetypal “round-up of 2023” blog post, I’m not entirely sure why.

I think, for me personally, it makes more sense to talk about the year ahead. Writing about it helps me plan it out. So, with that said…

My Artwork

The major goal is to finish off my Acid Renaissance series of artwork and publish it as a book. The major problem is that the series doesn’t have a predefined structure, so I’m going to have to gently shape these last pieces into the right form for it to end harmoniously.

I think this will involve several multi-figure drawings — in the same vein as Lamentation (2021) and Bacchanalia beneath the Wind Turbines (2019) — which means a whole load of life-drawing sessions need to be scheduled this year.

I’ve been studying books on the drawings of Raphael and Michelangelo, Giacometti, William Kentridge, Paula Rego, William Blake, Austin Osman Spare, Käthe Kollwitz, and others, trying to find the best approach.

A few of my regular life-models moved away from Brighton & Hove over the past few years — mainly to London — so I need to build up my list again, at least for the first six months of the year.

My Website

In the last quarter of last year I completely rebuilt this site from the ground up, which was a much-needed bit of development work, and I’m incrementally adding new functionality all the time.

This has given me a much better platform to publish my artwork, especially given the fragmentation of social media, triggered by the rapid acceleration of the enshittification of Twitter.

As Cory Doctorow wrote in Wired in 2022:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

If you don’t have your own website/blog already then get one now!

As Matt Mullenweg wrote at the beginning of this past week:

Publish a post. About anything! It can be long or short, a photo or a video, maybe a quote or a link to something you found interesting. Don’t sweat it. Just blog. Share something you created, or amplify something you enjoyed. It doesn’t take much. The act of publishing will be a gift for you and me.

You don’t have to code your website from the ground up like I did, you can get a free Wordpress site or similar (but make sure that, like Wordpress, it supports RSS Feeds so that people can subscribe to your updates), and just add your stuff using their admin panel without needing to know any coding language or other technical skills. And get an RSS Feed Reader so that you can see what other people are doing.

Anil Dash also wrote this last week in The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again in Rolling Stone:

What’s more, the people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive are seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again

Threads has already started promoting the worst sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic crap to me through my Instagram account, so the far-right are obviously also flocking to that platform. Bluesky seems a little better on that front, but soon the investors will want a return on their money, and enshittification will ensue.

Anyway, for 2024 get yourself (a) your own website, and (b) an RSS Feed Reader.

On a very much related note, I’ve also started getting into the whole concept of the IndieWeb, and I’ve already found a lot that resonates with my own thoughts and approach in it (plus more interesting stuff that I hadn’t thought about before).

My Life

And of course I have to live as well.

This means balancing all of the above with a hectic 28-hour-a-week day job, eating regular meals, generally taking care of myself, and de-stressing as much as possible.

I work remotely in my day job (and have done since before Covid) so I have a fair bit of freedom as to where I live.

Which is good because, if all goes to plan, I’ll be moving thirty-six miles east along the coast from my current home of Hove to somewhere new in Hastings.

The move is planned for sometime in the middle of this year, dictated by the expiration date of my current fixed-term rental contract, and is necessary because of the steeply rising costs of private rental accommodation in Brighton & Hove (I had a 20% rent increase two years ago, and a further 10% rent increase last year).

Relocating to Hastings will let me rent a larger flat or even a small house for the same price as my current one-bedroom flat here in Hove.

My aim is to have a dedicated room as a studio for my artwork, which will be a great improvement over having a studio that is also my living room.

Of course moving means I will need to start building up a whole new list of life models in the Hastings area, as well as settling into a new town, hopefully making a few friends, and generally dealing with all the other things that need to be done when you relocate.

So 2024 is going to be a busy year.