This year I need to put aerosol work even further back on the agenda, there is so much work I need to do in other media. Don’t get me wrong I will still make the effort and put some work in but there are so many other things I need to work on. It isn’t that I am focused on exposure or galleries or any particular agenda, it is more about the work. I need to put work into drawing, ink, oil and acrylic work all based on working from life with the need to find a new standard.

I am a bit sick of art that is a brand, or product, at least I know that won’t work for me. It works for others no doubt but I want to get into the world around me, observation, not of the supermarket or market but of nature and architecture. I don’t want to be put on the shelf, the lower shelf, middle or upper shelf. I want to find the world that is hidden in plain sight, the abstraction which is the observable world.

In the observable world there is something hidden again, the world of energy that pervades, the 神 shen, the closest english word is spirit but in the Western tradition it is too otherworldly and ghost like compared to the practical status of 神. Shen though is within ourselves as much as outside of ourselves. It isn’t a brand, it can’t be seen, it is inside, and the world that we observe is the surface, the dimensional surface held together by structure. The body, the animal, the elements.