Blog # 18

2013

Watched Jean Michel Basquiat documentary Radiant Child. I am drawn to his bee bop aesthetic. He crossed-out-words to make them more––forged a cryptic poetry of decaying meaning drawn from an open symbolic parade of his skull put down on canvas. He haemorrhaged pained joy. He was fuelled by street rite. A humanism of knowing wounds infiltrates his work––its blood base structure. But, his warm black milk got spilled––got licked up by the cats of capital. He was a prodigy. When I look at his painting he looks right back, knows something about me too.

Boundary Speak (Diaries 2013-2021) centrally focuses on reportage of my life’s happenings, notes on readings, phantasms or wild forays, riffs off music or footnotes from poems that take me on a strange journey, ruminations and thought fragments. My outsider artwork is focal on my Re-learn your Alphabet for the Twenty-First Century drawings (some of which are collaborations with my children), my robot series, as well as many other drawings undertaken over the period 2013-2021.