I’ve recently started to feel like my Acid Renaissance series is finally coming to a conclusion. There are perhaps three or four more pieces left to do, after which it will be finished. This series of artwork has been a rough and strange ride, interrupted by Covid and the subsequent lockdowns, and encompassing far more artwork than I initially envisaged it would. I’m still uncertain exactly how many more pieces the series needs until it feels to me that it’s complete, until I’m ready to let it go. As with my previous series of artwork England’s Dark Dreaming, I intend to publish all the Acid ..read more

Life-drawings from Monday and today (by the author) I’ve taken this week off as annual leave from my day-job, to both get some artwork done and to make sure I use up my annual leave before I lose it. I’ve also set up RSS and Atom feeds for my artwork (in addition to the feeds for this blog, website news, notes/posts, etc). You can find the details of the new feeds for my artwork on my Feeds page, or they should be automatically discoverable by a feed reader on the homepage of this website. So far I’ve done two of the three life-drawing sessions I have scheduled for this week. Following on fro ..read more

This post is part of the IndieWeb Carnival, a monthly blog carnival where one person decides on a broad theme that others should blog about. I haven’t done one of these before, but the topic for March 2024 — Accessibility in the Small Web — appealed to me, so here we go. When I rebuilt this site from scratch in the autumn of last year I tried to make sure it was as accessible as possible. I tested quite a few of the key pages using PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse and got 100% in the “Accessibility” category on all of them, so job done? Nope. Automated testing tools can only test some access ..read more

Detail from Saints & Martyrs This image has been a long time coming. I wrote on here over six months ago about some of the early planning for this piece, and how a lot of the early inspiration came from Paul Koudounaris’ 2013 book Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs (and a parallel with the siren from the Jibaro episode of Love, Death & Robots). But finally here it is (click the image for the larger pic in my gallery pages). Saints & Martyrs The original “catacomb saints” were the bones of early Christian martyrs (a very dubious claim, as P ..read more

In my post last month about life-drawing I mentioned that the amount of oil used in the Faber-Castell Pitt sanguine pencil meant that I couldn’t get the tonal variation from it that I could from graphite pencils. I ordered myself an oil-free sanguine pencil, but then — as often happens — discovered I already had an alternative buried in one of my many art supplies boxes! So this past weekend’s life-drawings are drawn with a Conté à Paris sanguine pencil, an oil-free pencil. Conté à Paris produce a range of different shades: Sanguine, Sanguine XVIII (a much redder colour), Sanguine Medicis (a ..read more

Devil’s Dyke, Sussex - photograph by the author In a post a few days ago I was writing about the importance of outgoing links as an integral — perhaps the integral — part of the web, and how social media sites seem to disfavour them because they encourage users to break out of their silos. This post continues that theme, but focuses on blogs. So, sometime in the past few weeks/months I copied some CSS I’d spotted on Tracy Durnell’s site that adds a little “North East Arrow” character after any outgoing link - you should see one immediately after that link to Tracy’s site if you’re reading thi ..read more

This is a quick blog post to let you all know that I have an article about my current Acid Renaissance series of artwork in the forthcoming issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion (Volume 2, Issue 2) published by Temporal Boundary Press: New issue of Albion's premier wyrd journal! This issue contains some of the best writing you will find on psychogeography, horror cinema, dark literature and strategies for metaphysical resistance. Thirteen all new articles! Table of contents for Volume 2, Issue 2: The Deep Shadows that Light Can Cast: The Making of Night of the Demon ..read more

View towards the Hope Valley, Derbyshire - photograph by the author Links from one page to another are so fundamental to the web that without them it simply would not exist. HyperText — the H and the T in HTML — is defined by the W3C as text which contains links to other texts. And there, by linking to a page on the W3C website, I have created hypertext and added to the web. The web is the links. So it’s worth looking into why most social media silos don’t really like you sharing outgoing links (tl;dr - the word “silo” is probably a spoiler here). URLs in text shared on Instagram posts are un ..read more

On Friday and Saturday I finally restarted the life-drawing thread of my artistic practice after a break since November. Rather than doing several drawings in each session as I have done before, I decided to concentrate on a single pose spread across several thirty minute sittings punctuated by short breaks to allow the model (and me!) to stretch and let their muscles recover from unnatural enforced stillness. So the weekend has produced two drawings, one from Friday and one from Saturday - the same pose in each, but with a different model and a different medium. I chose the pose for multiple ..read more

A day may come, as Aragorn might have said, when I finally get back to blogging about my artistic practice — the entire raison d’être of this blog — but it is not this day. I don’t want to blog about blogging, I really don’t. And yet here we are. As I alluded to in my last post here, the recent accelerated fragmentation and enshittification of social media has led to a growing feeling in some quarters that people should have their own websites which are separate from the silos of social media platforms (something I definitely agree with) and that the old web of the late 1990s and early 2000s ..read more