This is a digitised visual diary entry I made in 2005 and later used in my paintings for a solo exhibition called The Assassination of Judy Garland back in 2013. I have a lot of sketches and studies which never seen to see the light of day, and I’m turning them into prints in some cases, or adding them into my studies of the present. This one was scribbled Energize Mr Ellis on a print I found in one of my files. It was about fragmenting materiality, or disintegration such as dropping something in an acid bath, in this case, myths of American exceptionalism…

On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, it feels natural to me to revisit the paintings I did from 2003 to 2005 to process the profoundly altered society we were navigating at that time.In hindsight, I can see how we altered our world. I found the policy profession after this event no longer demanded of its practitioners…

I was so pleased when Dr Kyle Grayson asked if Routledge London could use my painting There is Nothing Like a Drone (2011) for his new book on targeted killing

I often use the term 'gateway image"to describe a painting which is a bridge between one series and the next. Most of the time it is not that clean, because you travel a road and the landscape changes along the way. So there are not really any breaks between one idea/exhibition and another. Instead, I find there is a gateway image.

One link between artists and soldiers is the promise of appreciation (immortality?) after death. There is no shortage of references to ‘tragic' artists in the canons of popular literature and a heroic soldier is more usually dead than alive. And if alive then far from the same person who left home. And artists of paint, word or film - it makes no difference - they’re so much better dead aren't they?

[Edited 23 September 2023] I re-tagged this 2008 post and photograph under my 2023 AUKUS Chronicles because I can’t really add to it in terms of describing the stunning silencing and political acquiescence of Australians to the AUKUS agreement. Led like children, and in 2023 the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is literally trying to recruit children with nuclear submarine ‘school projects’ to acculturate them into a culture of war (and by default, to train them to distrust the Chinese from childhood).My photo from the 'Suburban Dreamtime' series… is featured on the 2008 cover of Vancouver arts magazine Front Magazine.