#319: You have to do the work to earn the rest

Oil on canvas.  A painting of a man in an armchair reading a newspaper.  Behind, his wife can be seen hoovering, making dinner, cleaning the windows, making tea, dusting and other jobs.

#318: Masking Tape Reminder

Take a reel of masking tape.

Stick lengths of it along the edge of a shelf, or shelves, across your headboard, along a wall… somewhere you look at a lot. 

Write a meaningful message for yourself along it.

Preserve. 

Refer back to it whenever that message is needed.

Along the shelves in my imaginary office-slash-writing room:

There She Goes, My Beautiful World by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The wintergreen, the juniper

The cornflower and the chicory

All the words you said to me

Still vibrating in the air

The elm, the ash and the linden tree

The dark and deep, enchanted sea

The trembling moon and the stars unfurled

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again

John Wilmot penned his poetry

Riddled with the pox

Nabokov wrote on index cards,

At a lectern, in his socks

St. John of the Cross did his best stuff

Imprisoned in a box

And JohnnyThunders was half alive

When he wrote Chinese Rocks

Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears

Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears

Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years

I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles

While writing Das Kapital

And Gaugin, he buggered off, man

And went all tropical

While Philip Larkin stuck it out

In a library in Hull

And Dylan Thomas died drunk in

St. Vincent's hospital

I will kneel at your feet

I will lie at your door

I will rock you to sleep

I will roll on the floor

And I'll ask for nothing

Nothing in this life

I'll ask for nothing

Give me ever-lasting life

I just want to move the world

I just want to move the world

I just want to move the world

I just want to move

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,

Brother, and blow it

If you've got a field, that don't yield,

Well get up and hoe it

I look at you and you look at me and

Deep in our hearts know it

That you weren't much of a muse,

But then I weren't much of a poet

I will be your slave

I will peel you grapes

Up on your pedestal

With your ivory and apes

With your book of ideas

With your alchemy

Oh come on

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send it all around the world

'Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again

Or: Keep going, keep finding things, keep writing, let people know.

#317: Be Natural (How easy is it?)

Three word paintings, evenly spaced and sized, hung across the wall of a gallery.

The words on each painting are a follows:

1 - Be natural.

2 - No acting.

3 - No pretence.

(But no fighting please).

#316: Another World/Drive By/Nothing Will Be Done

A photograph of a rental scheme bike stood up and surrounded by bags filled with someone’s belongings.  Another collection of bags sits nearby surrounding a sleeping body. 

Everything is pictured underneath a flyover and next to a roundabout. Cars can be seen queued up and driving past - both behind, on a slip road, and to the side, on the roundabout itself.

#315: Living Seascape (Land's End)

A view of the ever-changing (and not always uniformly) seas around Land’s End livestreamed into a gallery onto a huge, and wide, screen in high definition.

#314: Living Landscape

A livestream of a landscape (looking across a valley, hills of different shapes beyond) shown on a large and wide screen in a gallery.  

#313: Is that all there is?

A blank canvas.