This picture is called Cow Shitting Pretty Things, 2011.
I hate 2011.
2011 has been the worst year of my life.
I can’t imagine anything else that could occur that would make this year any worse than it has been.
I look forward to the end of this year.
I look forward to the start of next year.
I am thinking of having some kind of hypnotherapy or lobotomy, maybe, to remove any trace of 2011 from my mind.
But that would be disastrous because then I’d think my mother was still alive, I hadn’t become estranged from 5 members of my family, and that my marriage hadn’t ended.
So that would be fucked up because I’d probably try to call my mother on the phone, find out she was dead, call my brother to find out what had happened, only to realise he no longer was speaking to me, and then go crying to my wife, only to find out she’s now just a stranger.

FUCK YOU 2011.
FUCK YOU TO DEATH.

It’s yours for your very own wall for £350.
Prints for £40.
70x100cm

I think, I feel, I KNOW, that my less ‘weighty’ outlook on life is partly attributable to TED talks.
TED has, for me, the exact opposite effect that say…SKY news might have, or the BBC news, where the emphasis is on the relentless horror of modern life.
Because, really, a positive outcome is death to a news story.
Keep those chilean miners down the hole as long as possible because once they’re up, once we’ve learned that they’re safe, no one gives a shit about what they’ll be eating for breakfast tomorrow.
Unless it turns out one eats crack for breakfast.
Then it’s all ‘rescued miner is junky crack-eater!’

This picture isn’t about news, or crack, or TED.
I’m not sure what it’s about, but there aren’t any penises in it nor the word cunt!

Maybe ill call it For Everafter Happy Days to the Chilean miners!

70x100cm black ink on Fabriano

Drawing this and listening to uplifting talk on TED.com.

Now, however, I need to see what’s showing on the inside of my eyelids!

70x100cm

I think of this as a ‘religious’ drawing.

Basically, the crying dog is the god/Jesus figure.
Why does he cry?
He cries for all the people I know who died last year.
Does god cry?
Who knows.
But I certainly have done.

The half circle up the top right is the sun.
Right down the bottom on the left is a city.
All those tumbling spirals and so on are the creation of the earth.
It’s like my own personal Cappella Sistina

I am not a reigious person, but I’ve had enough of it surround me for years and years and years that it’s inevitable that I would produce something that ‘feels’, to me anyway, like the creation story.

However, these little spirals also make me thing of fossils and things found underground; proper natural things, not stuff thought up by believers in supernatural creators.

I fear I haven’t explained myself well.

Never mind.

I’ll let the drawing do the talking.

Anyway, whatever it is, it’s finished.

70cm x 100cm, Black ink on Fabriano paper

I didn’t stop.
And here’s what happened!

Y’see, the trick is all in knowing when to stop!

This checkerboard stuff in the corner, it’s the night.
All the stars and planets and things are pouring from the sun.
That’s a treeline at the bottom and underneath?
The wormy earth.