Lazy Sunday Afternoon 22/09/02 21:43

I've added this news section so that visitors to this site can keep track of what I've been up to in the long black-outs between creating new artwork. You see everyone thinks that if you're an artist you should be constantly doing new work, knocking out tons and tons of the stuff to sell to a public wetting themselves with anticipation but it simply isn't like that. because of my restless soul and general attitude problem I find that my work is sporadic and unpredictable. I can go for months on end waiting for the beast within to suddenly strike, taking possession of my body and commanding me to paint or click away at my pc without sleep, food or washing until the work is done. I don't choose my artworks, the artworks choose me.

Having said that I have also been taking a lot of time out from producing art to try and sort out my life over the last couple of months. Because I feel compelled to drink as much as possible as often as possible this doesn't go down well with my bank balance so this summer has been spent holding down three, yes three jobs at once (although I did eventually get fired from my resident DJ slot at a particular Australian theme bar for reasons I won't go into here). Yes my friends, ever since the very day I turned 23 I have been earning a living being call-centre customer services scum. Did you get migrated from the old Mercury 131 onto the new Cable & Wireless 132 system only to later be told you were Npower now so you will have to change yet again to 162 or 1984 or r2d2 or whatever they've introduced this week? That was me that was, I did it and I did it good!

Of course the summer would have been a lot better, and I could have paid off the loan sharks if myself and Brian From the Cult hadn't had to flee our house thanks to the increasingly erratic and dangerous actions of our psycho live-in landlord. With this and my trusty van curling up its tyres on the way back from setting up 'Individuation:Post-Historic Perception' in Bedford library, I've not had the best of summers really but I'm sure I'll do some great work based around it. Coffee addiction is my main thing at the moment. Expect a series of woodcuts on the matter by Christmas.

Despite things being a bit of an anticlimax this summer I have managed to get a couple of things done in the middle of the chaos. Cruel Samoan starts again at the Monkey Cafe, Swansea on the 2nd of October. I'm a bit nervous about it because this year is going to be fairly make-or-break for the night and I want it to do well so we get the crowd it deserves. We're hoping to concentrate more on the artwork this time so hopefully we should see some good visuals again.

I also managed to fit in a couple of exhibitions over the summer as well. The second part of 'Individuation:Post-Historic Perceptions' at Bedford library was a lot better arranged than the first one in Dunstable and there was more space so I could show the 'Glass Bead Game' paintings as well as 'Five Short Films...'.

Not all of the 'Glass Bead Game' paintings were present at the Bedford show, mind. I entered the orange panels into the Swansea Open at the Glynn Vivian Gallery and, somewhat unsurprisingly, got in. They only had room for one of the panels unfortunately but they chose 'Orange Panel No. 1' which is easily my favourite out of the four so that was good. I was very impressed by the exhibition actually. They'd managed to actually put together a show that was truly representative of the arts scene here in Swansea so you had young punks like me and Andy Ward rubbing shoulders with genuinely-talented locals like Amanda Maria, Kara Smith (easily the greatest living artist in South Wales) and Louise King as well as a few 'Rah! Welsh power!!!' radicals and of course your typical landscapes painted by grannies. The show seemed pretty cool and was definitely an improvement on that Mark Wallinger rubbish they'd had before.

The 'Five Short Films...' paintings are beginning to annoy me to be honest as they're getting pretty tatty from being carted around all these exhibitions and also I'm a bit sick of showing my degree show work to death. The next time the paintings will be exhibited in public will be as ashes in a jam jar from where I've taken them to Three Cliffs Bay and burnt them. Of course, the whole thing will be documented thoroughly and I'll also make woodcuts of them as well so the public can have easily-affordable reproductions. After all, I had to learn something from the YBA's didn't I?