I saw these bins on a walk through my neighbourhood yesterday and the way they commanded my eye with their incantation spoke to me.

The project I’ve just been working on - a graphic novel - and likewise the news - are full of the uncontemplateable.

As if humans, (and other alive creatures,) have no long term value and are merely pawns in a power game being played by callous giants. It really is rubbish! What to do!?!

Here is a small protest, a found poem.

38 38 38 38 38.

Another series of images that moved me came with a visit to the Barbican to see the work of Noah Davis. He reimagined a specific and neglected Black suburb of LA as a place where citizens would be out practicing ballet, or gathering for communal swims.

I loved how he made the paint do the weird thing that paint does: translate from idea - into dream or trance. This is done physically and beams from the eye of the painter to the eye of the looker to lock them in a place where only paint things operate: colour, texture, tone and composition.

This painting had further synaesthetic power for me. The blurred blue paint and disappeared bits of the swimmers’ bodies seemed to produce those dissonant echoes and sounds that bounce around swimming pools, as well as that loose weightlessness that only water brings to the body.

I went to see the exhibition the day after sending my 200 page draft graphic novel to the publisher. I have hardly been out, so pressing was the deadline. This of course had an effect on the way I was looking. I was in that rather raw, extra awake state that comes after long concentration on making something.

I have been going out locally mind, for the odd little paint from observation - glad of the longer, lighter days. This act of staring down the seasons with my watercolour set has got me through the graphic novel, as well as helped me re learn how to draw for it, and it simultaneously puts the news to one side long enough that I can remember and relish all the concurrent beauty of the world and the now. Bigger than everything, the pale mauve irises and their pale tight buds, almost black against the calm onslaught of the setting sun.

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