One of the interesting things that social media platform Bluesky is doing is Starter Packs - lists that can be created by users to recommend other users — usually based around interest/occupation — “to help your community find each other”. When I posted this on Bluesky: Toying with the idea of creating a "British Weird" starter pack for RSS feeds (rather than Bluesky accounts), plus instructions of how to set up a free RSS Feed Reader account, and how to import the starter pack (OPML file) …a few people said it would be very useful, so here we go: What is an RSS Feed Reader? An RSS Feed Rea ..read more

The Horror Advent Calendar, 3 days in I was fortunate enough to receive one of James Burt’s Horror Advent Calendars which he writes about here. Each calendar is a collection of twenty-four short (and by short I mean microfiction) horror stories, sealed and numbered. In the letter included with the calendar James writes: This is a collection of short horror stories in the form of an advent calendar, one for every day up to Christmas Eve. Most of these stories are light, but a few are horrifying or depressing - those have been marked with a warning ‘tree’. If you imagine that you might be the ..read more

I’ve got three weeks booked off as holiday from my day job over Christmas/New Year. There are two reasons for this: firstly because I haven’t taken any holiday since May and I need to use it up before I lose it, and secondly because I desperately need some time off because I’m exhausted. Initially I need to rest and recuperate, and then, when I feel slightly more human again, I’m going to start planning out my artwork for 2025. In these last few months since I've moved to Hastings my artistic practice has been a little…slow. I've done a couple of life-drawings and photoshoots with a model fro ..read more

Three weeks ago I met up with visual arts writer Mark Sheerin to talk about my artwork. I’m delighted to say that the resulting interview has now been published on his site: I don’t believe in magic he tells me later in the East Brighton cafe to which we repair. But, dimly, I had thought of Paul Watson as a serious occultist, with a suitably esoteric vision. His last published body of work comprises of shadowy charcoal figure drawings of gloomy naked models. These subjects look so close to the relic-littered soil of old Albion. His drawings reference myth, pagan spirits, and a spirit of utte ..read more

A view from my studio window over Hastings’ West Hill. Photograph by the author. This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird. From Joe Crawford at ArtLung - Dune and Colonialism: I notice that Al has put up his post about Dune from 2021. It’s called Diving into Dune and in it he talks about his enjoyment of reading the books in advance of the then new film. From the ..read more

This blog post is more of a collection of notes than a cohesive article. I wrote it to help guide my own thinking on the subject (I find writing to be a good way to clarify my ideas and identify the things I want to look into further). As such there are no conclusions — this is a studio journal, not a scholarly research journal — but there are several rabbit holes… The starting point for this blog post was kindly being added by Maria J Pérez Cuervo, editor of the small press magazine Hellebore, to her British Weird Bluesky starter pack, described as a list of creators and scholars whose work ..read more

The “Folk Horror and folklore” starter pack The mass exodus from Twitter/X to Bluesky over the past weekend — #eXit as some have tagged it — has dramatically increased the number of followers I have there from about four hundred to over a thousand in the space of just a couple of days. With the number of new Bluesky users currently over nineteen million and still rising rapidly it seems that Bluesky is becoming a significant social media network. I’m presuming that the major factor for new people deciding to follow me is that some kind people have added me to their lists or “Starter Packs”, w ..read more

A detail from another shot in the Marsh Spirit photoshoot Most of the time I have at least some idea who the characters that I photograph are. Not so in this case - I came up with the title of The Marsh Spirit after the event. There are early sketches of this figure in my sketchbook towards the end of 2019, and I made the mask the model is wearing at around the same time, but nothing came of it. I bought the fern stencil that I used for the leaf marking on the model’s shoulder in late 2019 as well, knowing it would be part of this idea, just as my Acid Renaissance series was really starting t ..read more

Photograph by the author I am once again pondering if/how to make some short video pieces for my Acid Renaissance series. I did do a very short, static camera Children of Winter clip back at the start of the series in 2019, and while I haven’t done anything in that medium since, it has remained at the back of my mind as a possibility. The desire comes from the fact that I view a lot of the artwork in the series, especially the photographic work, as captured moments from longer sequences. One of the inspirations behind that was the look and feel of theatrical stage photography. However for the ..read more

A view from my studio window over Hastings’ West Hill. Photograph by the author. This is my inaugural monthly link dump, the first of a hopefully regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird. I’ve done four random link dump posts over the past ten years, and spent a lot more time than that moaning about discoverability on the small/indie/personal/open (or substitute your own preferred adjective) web ..read more