In 2020, much like the rest of the working world, gallery and artist land got hit by Covid-19 too. From the pandemic’s onset and progress into the following year I had three shows opening that more or less coincided with government lockdowns – that was excellent for a quiet contemplative gallery space but not so good for the gallerists expecting to sell some work. I also had a major exhibition of drawings cancelled that hopefully is being rescheduled for later this year.
So there was nothing to do but work from home… no change for me then. However it did focus my mind back to painting which I’d not done much of for several years. I started by pulling out a lot of older work from storage (the cupboard room of doom in the back of the studio) that lay unfinished because other work priorities had been demanded by various galleries. And once I started I dropped back into it quite contendedly.
None of this work has been exhibited as yet – but the advantage of the internet is that we can kind of do that now. There was a plan for a summer show of some of the smaller paintings here, but that has also been delayed by circumstances beyond the control of all involved – so here’s what I’ve been doing. All of these paintings were finished in 2022.

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An old nursery rhyme that reinforced the notion of knowing your place, of accepting your lot in life and not trying to fight that which has been dictated by the fates.

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace.
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go.
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living.
And the child born on the Sabbath dayIs bonny and blithe, good and gay.

I was born on a Wednesday if you’re interested… and I made my own contemporary version of the little rhyme too.

Nursery Crimes

Monday’s child has little choice
Tuesday’s child still has no voice
Wednesday’s child never did learn
That Thursdays’ child will crash and burn
So Friday’s child wished she could hide
While Saturday’s child fell by the side
And the child who was born on the Sabbath day
Will work like a dog for a pittance in pay

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first line:
prologue to a fine collapsing
when the whey falls way to the metal
and the bread devours the corn

oh president and minister,
you really think you rode at the front?
since you followed a more base choice than ‘orders’

who among us?
those ‘above’ us?
their blood is heavier, thicker, bloated
and ours just runs as sand through fine finger

counting the bullets and count the soldiers
as your mechanic’s analytic morality instructs

money is monster is master, and like attracts like
like ‘like’
those, are the rules you hold purchase as rule

divide your fools for the coin
and you’ll be a factor too

just an unknowing, algebraic function – divided, agent of fraction

not man, manufacture, bomb, bombast or bank
hedge for the better, best or worst

your juggernaut is not yours – and it will not slow
coin, coin, coin, is its self and guiding principle

rest with their children,
idealists and fools who holding candles you’ve long snuffed

surrender to the tow of the short river flow
occupy eponymous,
John/Jane Doe anonymous

we charge ‘please rest as a child’
was a charge to balance how much damage you leave

there’s a blacker balance than prophet
and lost opportunity is just that
thicker than the water financial fall

last line:
as it was, as it will be, now and forever (incoming)

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I’d like this to be my last word on the subject of AI generated art. Otherwise I’ll just end up sounding like an embittered dinosaur roaring into the impending meteor strike, waving a fossilised gingko walking stick at passing carnivores…
All of what follows is personal to my experience as a visual artist since… well – since when I discovered there was such a thing (as opposed to just being a kid having fun drawing imagined pirate ships, dinosaurs and apollo-inspired space rockets).
I don’t think AI generated art can ever be the same thing I do, because fundamentally the end result isn’t the prime reason I do it. I was making oil paintings for years before I had even the slightest inkling of an idea that there was a living to be made from it. It might seem strange to an audience where the internet and its offshoots seem to have been ever present and all encompassing, but in 1976, the year I first picked up a tube of oil paint, there was no notion of an ‘art world’. To a kid in a small north Somerset village, art was a subject of books full of interesting pictures and stories of dead people – usually blokes. The most that you would connect it to was perhaps some notion of ‘history’ because it all seemed to have happened and been done years and years before, but as a kid you rarely followed that up because the pictures were too much of a distraction. Or perhaps I just had the intellectual depth of a puddle.
Anyway… why do I make art? Essentially because I have found some need to make it inside me is fed by the doing of it. Perhaps when I was a kid it was the positive attention it garnered because I could make a pencil drawing give the impression of near photographic realism; having previously been the subject of substantial bullying, I liked the new positive attention… so I continued drawing and painting to keep getting that feedback. But in the end, it seemed that it was the one thing that I could do that I had full control over and so I just continued and obsessed over it. Eventually I started to discover the associated histories and theories of art, but that didn’t change the reasons for making the art. In a clichéd manner, it became like a paraphrasing of the mountaineer claiming that they climbed for no other reason that the mountain ‘was there’.
But (to coin another cliché… “it’s a cliché because it’s true”), the making of the work became more important than the end result. Certainly, from the early 1980s I was aware that there was the potential of having a career as an artist, but despite my increasing frustration and desperation of perpetually banging on gallery doors, I never had a painting in a commercial gallery show until 1993. But I couldn’t stop making the work. If I didn’t have money for canvas, I painted on old bedsheets glued to board, when I didn’t have oil paint I used children’s gouache or poster paint, when I didn’t have drawing paper I just drew on newspaper; my need to make drawings and paintings was insistent and obsessive – and the end results were rarely kept beyond a few showings to friends and family. I did sell the odd one or two, but any that left my hands to another were usually given away.
Where is this going? Well, friends know (because they’ve heard it in conversation) that if I never sold another painting, I would not stop making paintings. I can’t stop.
The programmers of AI generated art software only look at the processes to make an image as a means to an end, and unfortunately (the beast of our contemporary culture) that end is the financial reward realised by the production of a finished product. There are some artists, and I don’t criticise them for their position, who see what they do as producing a product solely for the result of putting bread on their table. I know artists who have given up making art because it is not generating the riches they hoped for. Perhaps they’re just being more realistic than I have been. Perhaps I’m nuts.
So, the top and bottom of it is that AI generated art, however pretty its results, will not have that attraction for me. It’s too easy; there’s no ‘work’.
I think this could play out the same way for the broader potential audience too. AI generated art has an intrinsic weakness (this may be algorithmically addressable – I don’t know) and that is its current methodology of referring, however marginally, to human created work as a source material. Sometimes this is even out of the digital hands of the machine as prompts such as ‘in the style of artist X’ are included when generating images. Consequently, and similarly driven by the financial need to appeal to the broadest possible market, the work will inevitably start to become limited to that tight financial, rather than creative, aesthetic.
I don’t know if this is a valid comparison or not… but take the last couple of decades of CGI created visual lunacy thrown at us in cinemas. As each new development in simulating apparent reality in depicting absolutely fantastical scenarios further challenged our belief in what we were watching was not real, the playing field for future films was being increasingly marked out into zones, halves and goals that had to be met by competing studios. The creatives’ aspect was becoming secondary to the accountants’ who wanted the box office returns that a previous film rolled in. Accordingly, we’re now at a point in time where so many of these films, particularly from the culturally omnivorous monolith that is Disney, are increasingly becoming exercises in tick-box blockbuster generation. The films are becoming increasingly formulaic, and the audience is already getting bored.
I said that I’d like this to be my last word… but while writing this another thought has stuck its head above the parapet – but I’ll save it for another day…

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drive on oak heart broken
the master’s yet spoken
for earth turned no more by the plough
that rest you thought gifted
short freedom to be lifted
and thrown as a dried fallen bough

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UNDERTOW

our span done, farewelled
fixed the governing entitled
but the world’s spin can’t be held
and there we slept sound, fast idled
sponged vinegar on the wound

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I first used newspaper as a support for drawing because it was paper that was free. There was no conceptual framework beyond the realisation that, while being in low paid work, there was no justification in paying the same amount of money for ‘artist’ quality drawing paper as for several day’s food for the young family I was bringing up.
At the end of any day I could find newspapers left on a bus seat or waiting room table; this was paper for sketching, doodling, messing around and perhaps working out ideas for paintings. You might also be interested to know that some of my paintings (even into my thirties) were made on old bed sheets, stretched and glued to hardboard – because canvas was also prohibitively expensive.
Occasionally there might be a headline that chimed with an idea I was drawing and I would play along with it – inspired by the artwork of Gee Vaucher (CRASS) and Winston Smith (Dead Kenndys) in my record collection, but generally I considered them disposable drawings. Some of these drawings I gave away, but most were thrown away. I didn’t think anybody would want sketches on newspaper. Galleries weren’t interested in my paintings throughout the 80s and 90s so they certainly weren’t going to be interested in drawings on newspaper by an unknown artist from a small rural town in north Somerset.
Shortly into a new century, and a new and growing collector interest in art that referenced punk vandalism, street paste-ups, text and newspaper collage and suddenly I find my work is fashion. Galleries are taking anything and everything that survived frequent clean outs and bonfires. Buyers are asking specifically for more drawings on newspaper.
So that’s where it came from for me. An aesthetic choice initiated by an economic necessity. Here’s some of that work over the years.

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Cassandra wakes
to whispers of snakes
And like lead
fills the cast in their head
The tar to be proof
against life shines tooth
But there’s no bite
to that fight anymore
Turn yet the light
show all the door
You’ll do ought for all
But they’ll do fuckall for thee

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I’m not sure where this post or argument is going but here goes anyway… Over the last couple of weeks the subject of AI generated artwork has been passing my eyeline repeatedly online. A couple of good friends and collectors have even passed on images made with free web-based software using my name as a text prompt. Coincidentally I also received an unsolicited email offer to buy a graphic novel where “All artwork was produced in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence…”
Tellingly the author describes himself thus “Sometimes, I start stuff. Less rarely, I finish stuff I started.” Really? Hmm…
And that’s what part of this problem boils down to isn’t it. The drag of having to deal with the actual effort involved to create.
Like a million other people I too have had an idea for a novel mentally gestating for years. It’s sat there in my head, getting worked on in my imagination… but the actual writing of it hasn’t been done. Why? Because it involves work and discipline and… effort, and I’m otherwise occupied.
I have also seen lately a lot of posts from artists (generally from the graphics and comics end of the trade) getting extremely concerned that their jobs could be being consigned to the dustbin as content sellers begin to choose AI as their more cost effective content producer. I see and support their arguments in combatting AI generated art (particularly that which is designed to replicate the style of a particular artist) but I also understand the arguments that they are facing.
I fear that it’s a fight that will not be won by the artists, particularly when you consider the financial might and monopolistic aspirations of the dwindling numbers controlling the publishing, media and entertainment industries.
From my perspective, at the moment, all I can think to do is type in some word prompts (including my name of course) into these AI art generators and look at the outcomes. Being honest, i can see why they have produced what they have produced. I can also see that I would not have let work that looked like that out of the studio with my name on it. So my current plan of attack is to steal their productions, that they have based on my stolen aesthetic, and to correct them.
Here are the first…
As an asides, currently AI generated artwork does not feel or smell anything like the real thing. These real world works contain oil paint, acrylic paint, charcoal, conte, oil pastel, chalk pastel, spraypaint, turpentine, dust, smoke… and love. The love of just making it – which is the primary reason why I do it. There isn’t a button on the keyboard for that.

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A theme for an exhibition in 2008 that took as a starting point my personal history dealing with my own mental health. Well, I recently discovered some packaging that was going to play a part in that exhibition but the work was never finished. So, I finished it, a dozen years on. Here it is…

And the drawings are followed by an excerpt of some words written back in the 90s… inspired by my regular visits to a local hospital. I’d made self-portraits on anti-depressant medication packaging since I was first diagnosed, perhaps 1991 or 92, out of boredom and frustration. They were pretty dark, so there was no audience for them pre-internet, and I lost them all in a studio fire fifteen years later.

the land of The waiting room
the waiting room
waiting empty
excepting the mathematically spaced chairs
Cold coloured plaster engages savage radiators
And the shopkeeper shrinks as the first cross her threshold
And I am the first
I am the first – always
Because my piece demands that single seat that sits at the feet of that thin black wall
That’s the seat that keeps their wall behind and our door well ahead
And I am the FIST
I am always the quiet fucking FIST
And the other heads know this when I look down their line
So we all stare as straightest be.
Just ahead
I am yet the first
And the other heads FIST
Since they’ve lost the ire and desire to even try
And instead black-eyed, emptily look ahead to
Contemplate that engaging minutiae
the one of gloss-coloured cold-covered plaster (at a breakneck sub-atomic level)
And the perpetual timedrying, airwarping, centralfuckingheating
And the ridiculous anger
the buried savagery of
their personal, perpetual angers
and on and on and on we fucking roll on
you could never say I have just rushed into this
still the still
anger
and the absolute unabsolved
ridiculous
pathos
of it all

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