CosmiKnot

Does art need to resolve the issues it wrestles with? De Kooning preferred his canvases to be an honourable battlefield and claimed that his Woman series of paintings was a mistake. He never finished them but instead desisted from working on them. They are in effect a by-product of his struggle between subject and abstraction. You could throw primal instinct versus control into the equation also. I was reminded of this by Mark Leckey ’s noble lecture at Harry and Jasper’s Tate Modern. He opened up by declaring that he thought that this would be a good opportunity to talk about some things that are in his head. Hands were the first thing he mentioned and how his own hands felt atrophied through lack of use. This withering of the limb was, we found out, felt more profoundly as he had entered art as a painter. We saw a Van Gogh clog and a Guston shoe to illustrate the sense of clonk that mark liked in painting. He also showed us some videos that manifested this idea of clonk or tacti...

Help I think I might be a knobber. And this is a genuine appeal not some reverse psychology where by I am absolved of knobber-suspect status by dint of my own knobber-awareness. Paulo Coelho said (See!) something along the lines that they only despise and insult you because they can’t understand why the rest would love you so much. Don’t know why I mentioned that because Alex Epstein doesn’t have enough ardent followers for this to make sense in his case. Never the less the extended media family has turned against him. He is said to have emailed some 700 hacks offering his services as a business consultant come agony uncle but what really got them in a tizzy was that he cc’d the lot of them so that now (sharp intake of breath) they all know each others emails. I have done the same with a group of about 50 people and one sent a firmly worded response as a result of my having hurled her very soul into the fiery flames of information hell (articulated in a more succinct and altogethe...

I am partial to books and diaries that package up epigrams with various pieces of visual paraphernalia from bygone and often overlooked cultural epochs. In one such tome I recall reading that time was created to stop everything from happening all at once. There are certain stories that were created to prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the prosaic nature of a world where things do not happen all at once. I would list Goldilocks and King Solomon’s Mines amongst these and perhaps also the Crucifixion. These tales are the word-based equivalent of the convex mirror in the Arnolfini Marriage capturing the infinite in a distilled moment. They ought to be published exclusively in the miniature editions viewable only through a magnifying glass such as the copy of the New Testament my Aunt would bring out from time to time, which, if memory serves me well was half the size of a telephone sim card. It is rare that one’s own life takes on the feeling of happening all at once over a prot...

The village people gathered round and they asked him to tell them about how they might come to accept change more readily and so he told them a story.  One drizzly winter morning, the kind when the rain can hardly seemed bothered to make anything wet, a local university lecturer was preparing to leave his house with his two young sons, who were playing in the walled garden at the front of the house. The garden was leafy all year round and the man was proud that he had planted the deciduous shrubs himself. Suddenly he heard the raised tinkling voices of his children coming from outside and hurried to find out what the cause of their excitement was. The boys were in good humour but it seemed that one of the household's two tortoiseshell cats had somehow perched itself on the handlebars of the elder sons bicycle when it took its morning crap. In their endeavours to avoid the excrement the two sons had haphazardly engineered to spread small portions of it about their attire. Ther...

A long time ago in a distant galaxy over half a lifetime away my then girlfriend suggested that I should try and do one thing I’m good at and stick with that. I have spent the intervening years periodically mulling this idea whilst stubbornly continuing to make stuff in any form that seems appropriate. Being an illustrator was my most deliberately considered attempt at a respectable well-defined career. In fact I would recommend that careers officers dig out the illustrator leaflet for any young person with a wide range of skill sets or perhaps one who likes both words and pictures, spending time alone and working with other people. Most illustrators I knew seemed to develop a thick skin and uncompromising attitude or were happy to be what was known as “jobbing”. I was probably a very idiosyncratic version of the latter, happy to draw anything or find a witty accompaniment to the most turgid article. If there were such a thing as pioneer of Internet illustration I would count myse...