Rearview Mirror: 2010 Studio diaries after the Gaza War 2008-09; & Wikileaks 2010
Since I wanted to draw some images about the last few weeks, which has affected me, my friends, communities I work with, so many, too many to name, I decided to pop my head back into my old 2008-10 files to shape my drawings now in 2023.
It seems to be that during times of great planetary change, if you’ve lived a while, you find yourself looking back and taking stock to try to better understand the present. Artists use both our perception of the world around us and what’s inside us to mirror that in our art, so we tend to keep a lot of diaries and notes, or at least we should. The reflective process is vital for me as a creative person. It is not so much document what’s happening for history, but the process itself helps me to learn and develop my visual ideas and narratives.
Here are some visual and audio diary entries from between 2009 and 2010 right in the middle of painting my series The Assassination of Judy Garland, which was a processing of the 2008-09 Gaza War, the election of Barack Obama, the start of drone use in wars, and of course the so-called ‘war on terror’ years. Did I forget Wikileaks? Are we here again, or perhaps completing the cycles begun during the last twin decade of mistakes?
So, more archives. I have so many diaries and archives around this time, as it must have been pouring out of me. I know I had a very hyperactive dream state and recorded a lot of images, stories, narratives that came to me at this time. These audio diaries are recorded from January to June 2010. Elements of these selected sketches and one painting found their way into three paintings: my portraits of Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel & Judy Garland.
The cupcakes featured in my painting "Kandahar Kandy". The first drawing is clearly a bombing scene using the metaphor of the game Tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses, with religious symbolism. I can’t recall using these elements in anything but, I have been told my narratives are dense and symbolic and, yeah, dense. The last image is a studio photo mid-way through completing my painting “Song of Julian, A Chanson des gestes”.
I also kept audio notes while in my studio during my ‘creative states’ which are all short snapshots of ideas, but they bring back that time and consciousness. I am finding messages and lessons and stories that I wish I had detected earlier, but also an appreciation for how long I have been analysing and questioning this time.
[Updated 10th January 2024]
