I thought I’d put up a post, to let you know that i’m still alive and to try and have a think about what i’ve been up to.

Well i’ve been at a meeting all day today where different people have been talking about the roll of art in the public realm.  which really dosn’t have much to do with painting necessarily but was interesting non the less.  leo fitzmaurice did a talk, he’s an artist based on merseyside who’s getting an international reputation,  he was speaking about one project where he and a group of artists moved into a tower block in liverpool that was due to be demolished.  so only about a third of the tower had residents in it.  he and a group of other artists lived there for 5 years building up a dialogue with the residents, learning about them as individuals, their fears about moving away, the upsides and downsides of the tower blocks, and really became a mediator between the housing agency and the residents, all the while creating work that responded to what he was experiencing.  he spoke about how it started off as a purely selfish act of basically getting loads of free space to work in, but eventually became a very much symbiotic venture between the artists and the rsidents, and the brief for the artists was that there was no brief.  they could choose to interact or not with the people around them and could do whatever they wanted with the view to having an exhibition near to the end.  but essentially they all ended up responding in one way or another with their surroundings, basically i found out that through years of neglect the population of liverpool has droppped from 1m to 450000 in the past 40yrs or so. in the past 2yrs the population has dropped a further 6000, and this was supposed to be a boom time for the city.  quite simply everybody is going down south for work.  and this is the reason why tower blocks are getting demolished, because they cannot be filled and thus sustained.  i think its fascinating because certain housing regeneration drives are now seeing artists as being central to their push to hault this mass exile.  basically, artists can offer creative responses to persistent problems, they can offer the ideas which can give a place that has lost its identity, the possibility of a new identity.  I can’t really remember everything that was said because i was being talked at for 6hrs, but i think this outlook can, if managed properly, become an incredibly positive drive for areas in need.  artists in general naturally gravitate towards those outsider areas, the cracks between the pavement so to speak and so if they are given  the proper liscense to be creative and then there are people put in place who understand the risk/gain effect of trusting and managing the artists initial intent, rather than jumping through the hoops of expectation and dumbing everything down for mass appeal, the artists then naturally begin to fill void spaces with potential.  the success seems to be acheived by opening up a dialogue between the community, the artist, the counsillors etc, not just taking the easy option and making something empty and vacuous for mass anaesthesia.

so i now wanna go live in a squat in liverpool, fancy joining me?  although i’m not sure how painting, which is such a bourgoise practice by the nature of its construction would fit into this ideological tirade. perhaps we can work on two fronts.

 the rest of this past week i have been in schools making lanterns for a parade we had on saturday.  kids are pretty damn amazing.  but i haven’t been able to do any work for my show, which is now upon me, and i’ve suffered a crisis of confidence.  spent the last few days so depressed that it was the greatest effort to even get out of bed, speaking to people or looking someone in the eye was just a chore i couldn’t face doing.  i don’t know why this happens, dunno whether its a chemical imbalance or that i just deal with things in the wrong way, but i know i need to work my balls off to get the pics up to scratch in time.