The Artist’s Notebook

I mentioned back on the very first day of this year that my friend Scott Wood and I were planning on setting up something around the “Hastings Weird”: There are some existing loose local networks/communities that I’d like to get involved with or am already getting involved with—both for the joy of being part of a community and with an eye towards Prefiguration—and there is also a gap that Scott Wood (of Reweirding, the London Fortean Society, and the Londonist) and I have identified for a…

The Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence. Photograph by the author. I’ve recently returned from a week’s holiday in Florence, a much-needed recharge for me, both artistically and to remedy my exhaustion from my day job. I have visited Florence before, but that was back when I was eighteen-years-old doing my A-Level Art. So last week’s visit felt like exploring a new place, particularly the Galleria dell'Accademia and the Uffizi Galleries, as well as the Museo Nazionale di San Marco, the Bargello,…

A detail from In the Dark Woods, 2019, from my Acid Renaissance series. I recently read, and greatly enjoyed, Alan Moore’s latest novel I Hear a New World, the second instalment in Moore’s Long London series, following on from The Great When. I’m not here to review it, but I would highly recommend it and its predecessor. I picked my copy up from my local Waterstones, unaware that this chain of bookshops are apparently the sole stockists of an Exclusive Edition with painted edges, end papers,…

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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Returning to owning things in a streaming worldby Sophie Koonin at localghost Will buying CDs and mp3s instead of streaming…

Over on my ‘about me’ page, many years ago, back in the teenage years of this millennium, I wrote: My artwork has sold to collectors across the world, mainly facilitated directly through online sales rather than through galleries or agents. And this has, until very recently, been true. Not so much nowadays, though. Over the past couple of years I’ve been taking part in more exhibitions and am seeing online sales gradually being replaced by sales from exhibitions, although sales in general are…

Over the course of the umpteenth heatwave last month, and in the wake of over 2700 excess deaths estimated in England and Wales during the May and June heatwaves, I read When there are wolves again by E. J. Swift. The blurb from the author’s website: Activist Lucy’s earliest memories are of living with her grandparents during the 2020 pandemic and discovering her grandmother’s love of birds. Filmmaker Hester was born on the day of the Chornobyl explosion and visits the site years later to film…

The UK government is finally starting to put together advice for households to stock up on food supplies, which should be announced as part of a campaign soon (I’ll add a link here when the official advice is released). According to the environment secretary Angela Eagle earlier this week: We’re about to experience probably the largest El Niño that has ever been seen, and that will lead to drier summers, wetter winters, with more extreme storms in this country. … If you’ve got a store of a bit…

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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!by Brennan Kenneth Brown at brennan.day We are makers of digital literature. Sacredness…

Since I’ve got an exhibition of my life-drawings coming up in September I’ve been thinking about the importance of observational drawing, and life-drawing in particular, within my artistic practice. The act of drawing plays an important, if sometimes behind-the-scenes, role in nearly every artists’ practice, regardless of what type of visual artwork they make. For me, drawing is the main artform I work in, as I noted way back in 2014 in a post called Drawing as a principle medium, or, “why I…

I’m having a new exhibition here in September this year, once again returning to 1200 Postcards on Queens Road in Hastings: Flesh & Bone An exhibition of life-drawings by Paul Watson. The new exhibition is entitled Flesh & Bone and will feature a selection of my life-drawings from the past few years. The venue is 1200 Postcards, a bar (in the tradition of Austin Osman Spare) on Queens Road in Hastings. The opening event for Flesh & Bone is 7pm-9pm on Friday 4th September, and all are welcome.…

Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Last Friday my friends and I drove east to Dungeness, a headland on the Kent coast. It’s most well-known for two nuclear power stations (both non-operational now), Prospect Cottage (the home of the late film-maker and artist Derek Jarman), and looking like a completely alien landscape. Sea Kale and other strange plants grow from Dungeness’ flat expanse of pebbles and scrub. To top it off, on the way back to Hastings we stopped off at Pett Level, where the beach…

Detail from the first life-drawing from today’s session I did my last life-drawing session of July earlier today, making a total of four sessions. I’ve got another life-drawing session booked for tomorrow afternoon. Thirty minute drawing with Sanguine pencil & Conté crayons I’ll probably not keep up with four sessions a month, but if I can commit to two or three per month then I won’t feel like I’m having to learn to draw again from scratch, which is definitely how I felt at the beginning of…

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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). The Sacred Potato and the £47 Checkout Pageby Paul at The Grumpy Welshman Six potatoes. Forty-seven pounds. Ceremonial water sold…

I’ve managed to fit in three sessions of life-drawing so far this month—on three sequential Fridays—with the possibility of another session next week. It’s reminded me of how valuable it is not to leave large periods of time between sessions: with weekly sessions I feel like I’m building on the top of the previous session’s work, rather than starting from scratch. Similarly, the first drawing of any session is usually not up-to-scratch and often ends up in the recycling bin! Whether it’s within…

I have written here about masks on twenty separate occasions (this post will make that twenty-one occasions), and my first book of artwork was titled Myth & Masks: Artwork by Paul Watson 2013–2015. They continue to fascinate me for many reasons. I wrote Masks, Deception, and Truth and Masks - a bit of politics and a bit of history back in 2014, which probably form the two foundational blog posts for the use of masks in my artwork. They contain a lot of historical examples of the perception and…

I finally managed to organise a life-drawing session—my first since April—to get back into practice. My aim is to get back into regular life drawing about three times a month to strengthen that part of my artistic practice. I decided to change from the graphite pencils I’ve been using so far this year to Sanguine pencil & Conté crayons, which I last used a year or two ago. Thirty minute drawing with Sanguine pencil & Conté crayons It took until the third drawing of the session—reproduced…

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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). The commons were never theory – It was always practiceby Hamish Campbell at #OMN (Open Media Network) Let’s be clear about…

Stolen from the 1990 film “Hardware” - Angry Bob. This month started off with a colonoscopy, which, honestly, is not the best way to start a month. *record scratch* - let me explain (spoiler: I’m absolutely fine). Here in the UK the NHS sends out home testing kits for bowel cancer (called colorectal cancer in the US) every two years to everyone over 50 years of age. You do the test, pop the results in the freepost envelope provided, and usually you get a letter from the NHS a couple of weeks…

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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Notes From Psychick Albionby Cormac Pentecost at Temporal Boundary Nostalgia and religious experience are both, therefore, relevant…

Dionysos Skêptouchos, flanked by Maenads (a collage of three of my Acid Renaissance photographs) It’s one of those times when numerous disparate articles I read, written by people who I doubt are even aware of each other, seem to be swirling around a shared theme. The zeitgeist of the past few weeks seems to be a battle between the dominant Apollonian mode and a resurgent Dionysianism, but the subject matter stretches from the AI and the IndieWeb, to politics and popular music. A few weeks ago…

This Saturday (9th May) EDGEWAYS presents "Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced" with me talking about my artwork on Zoom from 20:00 BST. Attendance is free, but places are limited so you’ll need to register beforehand. About EDGEWAYS Welcome to EDGEWAYS… Where we explore the paths less taken, the forgotten stairwells of history and the unanswered questions of art, science and magic. EDGEWAYS Saturday Night Gatherings were originally organised for a few friends to come together to…

Jack in the Green attendees sitting on Hastings West Hill. Photograph by the author. Yesterday was the Hastings Jack in the Green festival, an annual event marked by strange costumes, drinking, and a lot of the colour green. I wrote about last year’s event, and posted a lot of photographs of the 2023 event. Jack was duly slain after 4pm and and his leaves distributed by the Bogies to the crowd - and I now have a new leaf to replace the leaf from 2026. If this last sentence is a little confusing…

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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Incels Won the Culture Warby Brennan Kenneth Brown at Brennan's Weblog We have spent years treating incel culture as a fringe, a…

A detail from another photograph from the shoot. Last weekend I worked with a model to produce a set of photographs based around the concept of the siren, a mythological character from Homer’s Odyssey. The subject matter had been suggested by the model when she was life-modelling for me some months earlier - actually the character was initially suggested as a mermaid, a cryptid often mixed up with sirens in the medieval period, but I wanted to steer closer to the original Ancient Greek myth. I…

A night at 1200 Postcards (that’s not me DJing) It’s been a strangely busy past few weeks, to the point where I’m not entirely sure where all my time disappeared to. Well, I guess first there’s the fact that three friends and I have formed a band, and we’ve been starting to put some songs together with a sort of post-punk/alternative sound: tribal drums, driving bass, and...

I have discovered that the Sussex Dialect word for a sea mist is a roke. 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 - all discovered through my RSS fee...

The new issue of Mycelium Parish News (copies are still available on Etsy - details in that last link) arrived on my doormat this morning, full of the interesting things that James Burt and Dan Sumption have seen or heard about during 2025. It is, as always, a delight to read, and in the interests of transparency and full disclosure I should mention that they kindly incl...