Creation is not only for artists. Students who are discovering their voices to call for a ceasefire in Gaza are, collectively, creating a moment in history. Those opposing it will apply the same silencing, disparaging comments, and threats, as they have to artists who have challenged doctrine for millennia.

I have two articles in Radical Commons! (or Radco! as it is known by the student body) this month. Radco! is a new left student zine started by students at the University of Michigan Law School which was formed to create a safe space for left students in what is recognised as a fairly conservative profession…They also published my 27th February blog post on the death of Aaron Bushnell, may he rest in peace.

Artists paint especially when there are no words left…

Deeply grateful to editors of The Australian Fabian Review # 6, 2024 for featuring my four 2010 paintings & extract from my blog post last year about the provenance of wars in Gaza. Their cover art is very clear: “Stop Killing Children”.

I was reminded with all the stories around the Indo-Pacific and naval activities of some artworks from my 1992 solo exhibition Dualities. I was 24 and they have that graphic style from the era as I was doing graphic design back then before I discovered paint and canvas. It is the same theme, starting with dry pastel on paper in very vivid colours (1). All titled the same, Ship of Fools. This first image was actually the last incarnation. I started off with some pen and ink cross hatch drawings (3), the theme then evolved into an etching/aquatint on cotton rag (2).

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…