For me symbolic acts are important. I cannot grow enough food to feed my family, I do not need to build a fire or to forage for food and yet by the act of planting, foraging and setting a fire I connect with both nature and as a human existing within nature. For me, before gazing at the stars, I need to feel my feet are firmly planted on the earth.

I call my actions symbolic because, unlike my ancestors, I do not need to perform them for my survival. I am disconnected from nature even though I am still dependent on it. My reality is that of an end user, I consume without creating, I can turn on the heating switch on a light, I forage the supermarket shelves and try to grow my savings or the number of friends on my facebook account.

We are more than this, we are not cogs in wheels, units of productivity, consumers, customers, clients, flow throughs, clicks or bodies.... we are human and we need to remind ourselves we are part of the world not parasites crawling over it.

Perhaps it is the innate insecurity of the male sex which has created this fragile sense of superiority. It is only reproduction which provides any reason for existence. Logically the number of males far outnumbers the requiste of  maintaining a healthy gene pool.

Therefore from earliest times males have needed to justify their existence and create meaning beyond being a sperm production and delivery system.  Culture has developed from this fundimental insecurity Camille Paglia famously wrote that without this masculine drive 'humans would still be living in grass huts.'  This is not as insulting to women as it at first might appear, the grass huts would be clean and form orderly villages, the society would be humane and the need for war and prestige would never come before human life. Art would still exist and thrive and technology would reflect need rather than aspiration. In short far closer to a utopian ideal than anything males have managed to sustain. 

I believe in universal sexual equality.regardless of religion, culture and tradition. The oppression and wasted potential of women throughout the world is the greatest hinderance to human progress. More than this, Those religions, cultures and traditions which restrict the freedoms of women and deny equal opportunity in all spheres of society should not be tolerated 'anywhere.'

We cannot call ourselves men if we deny women equality in the name of religion or tradition. 

Serial killers are the boggymen of our time. The public appetite for perversity and horror is as strong now as when criminals were hung and gutted, whilst still alive, by London Bridge. Films and books feed this need within us and the serial killer and his mode of killing attain of ghoulish glamour. We are no longer satisfied with murder itself, we need imagination and ever more depravity in our serial killers. Authors and film makers are creating ever more gore ridden act of sadism, the psychopaths are increasingly portayed as creative masters of evil. Too often the creativity of the writer is transferred onto his creation.

In truth serial killers are all the more terrifying because they are just like use in all but a few million screwed up brain cells. They are not monsters but social inadequates who cannot form normal sexual relationships. most have been abused by adults at an early age or suffer a kind of emotional autism.

The serial killer is a mundane creature of habit, devoid of humanity and led by a depraved appetite . It is our need for a boggyman which invests these killers with a kind of kudos. In a culture where fame is everything good and evil are means to the same end.

It is now obvious that the Government is going far beyond the austerity measures it considers essential to bring Britain back into the black. The actions have a slash and burn quality which  reveals a pathological hatred of state investment in directing social policy.

Thatcherism was based on an ideology, a distorted and wrong view of how society works but at least it had a logic. This ConDem government seems to have no long term strategy, it can only repeat it's absurd mantra of 'Big Society' whilst undermining it by cutting at the very fabric of that society. A government with no long term policy or imagination can only repeat the same mistakes. Cuts lead to cuts lead to cuts until only the bloody scars of their actions remain.

Whatever happened to pragmatism and vision?  We now have a government intent on blaming society for the crimes of the banks. We must keep our eye on the lie and never forget the cause of this recession. 

We go to the expensive supermarkets to window shop the meat and fish. We can't even afford the stuff in the bargain bins. The rich can have their lean and organic, Angie knows how to make a feast on a fiver that tastes fantastic, We grow what we can and forage in the Summer and Autumn in the local countryside. We get by. 

Cheap cuts of meat taste better than expensive if you know how to cook, it's a matter of time and patience and the love of food and feeding others. I crave a rib eye steak now and then Angie dreams of tiger prawns. If we had cash we'd probably crave other things less obtainable or, like Elvis, go back to childhood comfort foods and times when a double cheeseburger was the height of luxury.

The runner beans dangle on the end of green flex stems, a few red lip like flowers still remain high up on the tangled trellis. The tomatoes, in trusses of six and eight, are green though swelling and lightening by the day, yellow stars cluster, fad and soon become a brooch of green pearls pinned on leaf lapels.

Butterfly eggs, a disc of tiny powder yellow cones upon a nasturtium leaf. On another wire thin caterpillars graze along it's edge. The flowers burn orange, crimson, stems seem overstretched and awkward as adolescent limbs.

Slugs and snails hide beneath the detritus, paint silver trails along the path. Here and there a drying corpse black as a charcoal stub. Starling emptied shells litter the shadows beneath the lilac bush.

The sky shows rain, the air has enough of a chill to warn of September and yet Summer clings like ripening fruit bowing the branch and promising sweeteness before the fall.

One of the main themes of contemporary art is isolation. We have the right of self expression and are free to say almost anything without risk of public censor. But is this really creative freedom?

For a taboo to have meaning each member of a society must have a specific social value, the impact of transgression is felt both by the taboo breaker and the society. It is not a matter of simply being offended there is also a sense of loss as the transgressor his push to the edge or completely out of society.

To be free requires consequences for actions which express individual freedom. In modern society the transgressor if criminal is punished and if intellectual is ignored. This is death by isolation for an artist. Society is easily offended by images but there are few taboos left to break.

When looking at Abstract Expressionism, of the artists who made up this loose collection a number were isolated within themselves due to addiction or illness. The definer and apologist for this movement, Clement Greenberg espoused a language specific to art. Artists had their work defined by a critic whose concept of modern art was both restricting and to a large extent prescriptive. What appear, at first, to be a expressions of freedom soon become desperate statements. Greenberg turned art into an !..... ART!  

The illusion of freedom is the first rule of contemporary art. The second is the lie of self expression and the third is perpetual originality. Artist as magician having to pull new objects and images from his top hat. Is this freedom? Freedom is being ignored, it is the beginning, it is the seasoning of an idea. An artist should be a dog without a name.

My Nan would have laughed! Britain's are once more being ruled by their 'Better's.' In other words the clots whom assume they have a right of birth rather than the brains to lead a country. They will , of course, deny this belief and make every effort to play the middle class role but this is all it is, a act.

There are 19 Eton old boys in government, including the Prime Minister. It is no surprise that other members of the old school tie brigade are being given influencial jobs in areas which will direct government spending and policy. The class system still thrives in Britain, the next few years of this government will serve to show how deeply it is enshrined within society.

There is a visual hunger, an appetite which cannot be satisfied. It is beyond seeing, it is the desire to possess by sight to own by some vicarious act of observation. To look until the mind aches to be released from it's fascination, to look until the thing becomes beyond itself, exceeds it's structure and meaning and, when at it's most singular, most detatched, to suddenly collapse in the mind. Here is the experience of things, a pure visual experience when meaningfulness becomes matter indivisible. When made objects become as pebbles on a beach. The synthetic cannot escape being likened to nature in texture and form when viewed without reference to its use or meaning. In this state is found a joy more honest than freedom. To know one is connected to everyone and everything makes the concept of freedom an absurdity.

I look at art made by children and untrained adults. I find doodles and graffiti interesting. Images which are free of inhibition can contain visual absurdities which first attract the instinct and the gut rather than the educated eye or intellect. To an extent it is this which comprises much of modernist art under the loose heading of Expressionism.

I think the success of this kind of art occurs when it balances on the edge of being art and becoming something else, that teetering on the brink before the safety net of inclusion takes away it's living value and makes it artifact.

Existentialism interests me. How do we live in a world without God? no hell or heaven, no judgement, reward or punishment. It is daunting to have to take total responsibility for every action knowing there can be no divine forgiveness for the consequences.

What value is there in life other than that of living it, a journey from A to B, a beginning, an end, nothing but a thread of experience between to points. Existentialism draws us into the darkness and leads us through reason to loss and despair as we come to realise reason and knowledge cannot compensate for the comfort of faith. 

I have never believed in an age of innocence, I prefer to describe it in a less poetic way as gradual change of the learning process as we move from an intimate form of exploration to a more systematic form of education whose main objective is to assimulate us into the culture.

As art is a form of communication, in fact a metalauguage for all other visual forms of communication the need to understand how art interweaves, permiates or enfuses these other modes is important. That it is almost impossible to provide a meaningful definition of Art other than it being a product of human endeavour and/or selection demonstrates how fully art infuses the possibility and potential of all forms of visual communication.

So what is it that I want to seperate in some way from this metalanguage? and is it possible to do so? I believe we develop through a process of searching the outside world for what is innately present in the form of a mental predisposition toward shape and pattern recognition. Light and darkness and colour quickly collect meaning beyond their qualities because they are always linked together with other sense experience. It is this random accumulation of emotion, experience and sensation and the way we redefine this data as we grow and our thought processes develop which becomes lost within the assimulation process. 

I believe ultimately all art is autobiographical. All our work cannot escape being influenced by our past, each mark and method, each interpretation, adaption, omission or erasion is at the cutting edge of personal experience.

The problem with autobiography is that it presumes a journey within time from A to B  when for many artists it is the struggle to locate what has been lost or buried beneath the accumulation of knowledge and experience which is the enduring personal objective.

We learn to make art but what do we make before we learn to call it art? What we forget as we become assimmulated into the world of signs and symbols is the sense of value we placed upon objects and marks made before we understood what we were creating, before we  needed to be told we were making art. 

It is tempting to use the word authenticity to describe what we wish to retrieve. This word carries to much baggage as does the impossibility of the idea of a return to a fictional time of innocence. What we desire is find a way of describing something in the most direct way to ourselves. The artist must have a dialogue with their past before they can claim to be communicating honestly with the world. I feel most artists take the easy option by allowing hints and ambiguous references to show through in their work but shy away from going into their pre assimulated past. Perhaps there is good reason, fear is an honest response, that what they then create would not be considered art (ART)  is also reasonable. However, I believe for many the feeling that it is safer to travel from A to B when the reason for the journey is not brought into question is the honest answer. 

It is easier to accumulate work, to develop ideas and explore issues than ask the direct question Why do I make this?  What started this obssesive behaviour? Can I remove some of the learned to uncover the making in itself  and off itself. 

What is a junkyard dog? it is a dog who lives in a junkyard. The dog can stop living in a junkyard but it can never stop being a dog. I know I know I know.....       

I do not understand how or why a painted image can inspire such feelings of horror and disgust. The rendering of the everyday, the humdrum world of things and activities, the dull ache of normality like cottom wool plugs muffling the screams. Perhaps it is in images such as these that I become aware of civilisation as a surface, a screen on which we all project our mutual beliefs and aspirations. We project our fiction, our illusion of control and security of our sense of value and destiny and significance within some half comprehended whole. I have always had the feeling I am about to fall or that things will fall away from me.

The work of illustrator Frank Wingfield is known by most people who were children in the 1950's through to the 1970's. He worked on many Ladybird childrens books over a wide range of subjects. What interests me is the body of work he produced which represented contemporary life in Britain during the period he was working for Penguin. As a child Wingfield's illustrations made me feel uncomfortable, I could not describe why, perhaps he made images which, though supposedly depicting everyday life, made me feel as if I was looking through a door into a place I was not permitted to go.

His work is bright and photorealistic in that it is obvious photographs were used almost exclusively as references and the compositions have a sense of being framed by a camera. The people and the world he depicts is a sanitised version of reality. I can only describe my feeling as akin to seeing a car painted with matt emulsion paint, it is both real and wrong at the same time, the flattening effect of the paint fights against the space in which it exists creating a visual experience in which the car seems to act as a magnet leeching the surrounding area of vitality.

The adults and children he paints have a curious sense of being overmade up, as though on stage and this creates a sense of theatricality in what should be everyday naturalistic scenes, emotions become gross and normal at the same time. As a child I found his work frightening and at times oppressive. But then I was a weird little boy.