Art saves me every day. Every morning when I wake up I am angry that I am not dead. That’s Depression for you. I suffer badly from it. Then I walk straight into my print room which is a small box room at the front of my house. Its very small and there is much crammed into every space. There are ink stains and wet splodges of things, paint and ink, water, charcoal. A bucket of Oak galls. A pile of old newspapers. Paper, wet ready for pressing, orders, frames, Lino sheets, my record collection. All of my shit. Its good in there and I am good then and slowly you start putting into place all the filters you will need for that day.

With the filters of course comes a lessening of the light that we need to see in order to create some art. So your mind can become fogged by your energy bouncing between the filters. You start to fret and wonder if your art is anything at all. That’s when you start staring at it. From your peripheral vision at first as you pass it. Because you see its already framed and signed or whatever and hung in some place for you to look at. When everyone has made the normal noises about it and have forgotten it, it is still there. Just hanging from a nail. You pass and use that side eye. Then pretend there is something on the glass, so you peer closely and scratch. But you have seen too much and walk away quick. At some point you will get personal.

This is the point when the long staring starts. You just stand there in front of it and just look at it closely, then further back. Then right up against it. Then back. Then stare. Motionless. Looking.

When I sketched the initial idea of the above Intaglio you have to fuck the filters off and get in the dirt. You can’t appreciate the madness of a Heathland Ecology and the violence in them. This is Cannock Chase but it also has elements of other systems too. Not far from Castle Ring where it starts to get really weird and fucked up. But the ecology is all competition, all vying for space and light and air. Strategies and competition. Plant warfare. My unfiltered head was absolutely spinning with it. Battle, every blade of grass in competition with it’s neighbour. The Tree as Spear, the branch as a Flagstaff, banners of thick leaf. Now the wind blows and you see advance and retreat of leaf and branch, backwards and forwards like the ebb and flow of an English Civil War battle. I just slashed charcoal across the paper. Just violent plan and map instead of art. It was fucking dark and cool. You see me deep in the Bilberry laughing to myself but then a flight of Birds erupted from somewhere and flew above the Warfare and Strategies. All fucking chilled out in a line with not a care in the world and then just fucking flew off into the distance.

It was cool. A woman Artist once had a rant about why it’s only Men that ‘suffer’ for their Art when Women just get on with it. It’s because you are Creators and we are Destroyers. We destroy shit, kill things, break stuff. We are aggressive and violent. We lie and we cheat, we filter our world. To create things is an Alien concept. Not to create Weapons or new ways to Kill and survive, but to make sense of the World we are living in and trying to share what is in our minds with others so they may also see new things and maybe get new ways of seeing too. If you knew how much pain we are in, us men, to allow ourselves do this, to dig around in our cess pit minds for new ideas to share. You would be staggered.

My friend Waldo said I should talk about things other than football on the Blog so I have done what he said. Some of it will be as raw as fuck because I will be discussing Wolverhampton a lot I suppose. As well as some of the other things I get up to like the Band. Sorry about moaning at the beginning but it’s best to tell the truth from the off.