My latest booklet: Back To Earth / My Trumpet, Miles Davis and The Art Rut

Back To Earth...back to reality? Heaven forbid, reality being so...(insert appropriate text according to outlook).

24 pages of art so relatively slim by my usual standards but as you know, it's all about the quality, not the width. And it's full of quality visualisations from the typewriter - it is! I'm blowing my own trumpet because no-one else is going to, are they? Or are they? Perhaps out there in the online universe someone is, at this very moment, blowing my trumpet for me. Heh-heh. I tried blowing an actual trumpet once. You can imagine how painful it sounded. I've nothing but admiration for anyone...no, not just anyone, anyone who blows a trumpet in a style I enjoy. Like Miles Davis, of course, but you know what he did, he started playing fast and smart Be-Bop in the commonly recognised hip style of the day, but never one to rest on his laurels, two decades later he could be heard yelping, squealing and barping (not a real word, is it?) along with his cutting edge crew of musos moulded to his own sound/vision. 

Dare I say (yes I do) that I have an affinity with Miles Davis with respect to my typewriting? Pretentious? Perhaps, but I thought it, now I'm committing it to the screen. I mean, like him, I'm always looking for new ways to say something with my visual poetry. I'm not saying one should always 'make it new', just that I like to move on and around themes, ideas, methods. I revisit some, expand others, test new ones and so on. We all know the Art Rut. An artist hits on a style then does it over and over again. I don't care. Carry on. It's not always to the detriment of the work. It creates a familiar style and as with, say, Warhol prints, if you like that style, it's good.

I suspect people like the familiar. Yes, in the sense of finding the avant-garde difficult, but also familiarity with an artists's style because it's instantly recognisable therefore somehow comforting...reassuring. The problem with an artist varying what they do is that the viewer, liking one style, may not like another and therefore gets grumpy, disappointed. Oh well...

All that said, I've been told I have a recognisable style. I can't second guess how others view all my work. I was, however, just a little disappointed, thinking 'Oh no, I'm predictable!' I can't tell when I'm making all those marks on all that paper...I don't get an overview, just something like one when, as happened recently, a collector visited and I had to go through the boxes, choosing a selection. Then I look back and sometimes think 'Damn, that was a good one!' If a piece really strikes me as great, I might think 'I should do more like that'. Sometimes I try but, you know what? You can't go back. In my case, perhaps the typewriter used broke forever and has been chucked away. But more...profoundly(?), it seems to be impossible to actually do it again because I've changed, somehow. 

Anyway, here's my latest booklet, inspired by science-fiction, all quotes coming from old sci-fi mags. If you'd like a copy, it costs £10 and is in the shop. 

TTFN!