Gordon Brown.... when will they put the stake through him?

Well. We have had The Big Speech. Dreadful bilge from start to finish. A shopping list of un-costed bribes with our money to buy votes from the undeserving client state - worse, people who might have had a future of self-respect and growth but who have been sold down the river by Brown.

This man and his acolytes have destroyed the only route out for the poor, namely education, devalued the standards, yet still more people fail to attain any results at all - despite the headline 'passes'. Illiteracy is now a serious problem in this country. Having been denied the basic tools of survival in a modern economy people are then made subjects of the handout state - where if you do show any sign of energy and personal ambition the punishment is a marginal rate of tax of over 80% - in lost benefits as well as actual taxation. So 'progressive'.

The rest of it - simple minded scare mongering and lying about what the Conservatives will do. Of course they will cut the size of the state. They have to. We have more than one in four of the people in the working population working for the government and the highest tax take in history. It is not sustainable - especially when we are all supposed to be saving for our own old age - with what? We haven't anything left.

The big question that no one is yet addressing is this - what should the government actually do? What are the things that ONLY government can do for the benefit of the people? I would argue that this is actually a very limited subset of its current activities: defence, maintenance of law, foreign policy, possibly transport infrastructure - though I believe that trains would be better privatised completely with wheels and rails together, as they were built - and ensuring universal access, though not necessarily ownership of the means of delivering, health care, like-wise education.

Social provision and intervention is something that may be more effectively and humanely delivered by charitable organisations, if we allow for American style tax breaks for donation, and great swathes of the micro-managment and nanny state can simply be disposed of.

Progress!

Another quicky - proof of the old saying that the more I practice the luckier I get: started proper mailshots of galleries last night and got a positive response - 1 in 20 is not bad going I think.

Its not an instant buy but a statement of interest with potential, which is as good as I am going to get at the moment.

Saatchi Gallery

Marketing has to be done. Completely distressed by my invisibility on the web unless I type my own name! Since no one has ever heard of me this is a highly unlikely search!

So what to do? First port of call has been to sign up to the Saatchi Gallery online. It all looks quite neat. Small steps I guess.

Social Stereotype

Well it is Friday thank heaven and the weekend has officially started - the first glass is down and I can unwind and think about doing another sculpture over the weekend.

I think it is the tenor of the times but my recent big feet people have been a bit more complicated and downbeat. The horrendous double-speak and outright lying of our shambles of a government and the general dawning of realisation of just how big a hole they have dug for us does not lend itself to good cheer. It certainly means I can 't hope to make much headway in getting this stuff off the ground so I can live on it, keep plugging away at the day job then! I think this weekends effort might well be another 'angry' one, just have to see...

To counter the gloom here is one I made earlier, gentle mickey taking of someone I know 'Long Shot':

Weird Values

Another moment of pure bewilderment today. I had an enquiry about doing a portrait from someone who had seen the one below. They baulked at the price. It is more than a weeks full-time work and they wouldn't have batted an eyelid at paying a plumber what I asked.

It is a truth about art - people will expect it to be cheaper than it should be for the maker to live, yet those same people will happily spend far more on a new TV or car that depreciates and falls apart all too quickly. Rather than a new car every three years why not every four and spend the difference on quality paintings? Because they see value in the depreciating chunk of metal the same as everyone else's, but not in original objects. Peculiar.

Working Statement

I am trying to interest galleries in selling my work and one has asked for a cv (very brief in my case) and a working statement. Now I normally regard these things as rather precious but you have to play the game, so with tongue welded to cheek here is the first draft:

'Art is about humanity. It is about our emotions and how we respond to the world we are in. Figurative art has the power to convey emotion in a way that abstraction does not because we have learned the language of the human body and how it displays emotion from the very earliest moments of our lives.

To be effective a sculpture must live and move; stylisation can help this. Simplification of the line and form of the figure does not invalidate its ability to communicate. It can enhance it by removing the artists idea of the particular, the original, and letting the observer find their own resemblances – allowing them to identify with it. My current style, with the tapering body shape and exaggerated hands and feet arose from experience drawing in public, seated on the ground. I realised that I shared the viewpoint of a small child and I think this subconscious memory encourages people to feel positively about these images.

My most recent work has been divided between experiments in life-like portraiture, which is challenging in the sense of capturing the spirit of the sitter as well as a mechanical likeness, and simplified, almost caricature figures. These figures have tended to be comic, recognising stereotypes and idiosyncrasies in the people I know. I especially enjoy the guessing game among people who see them about who I based them on.

Some of these stylised figures, however, have started to make use of this ‘recognition factor’ to explore more complicated subjects and to ask questions about where we are as a society. I would like to think that all these pieces can be experienced at more than one level and that any deeper meanings that emerge does not remove from their aesthetic appeal.'

Tax the rich....

Tax the rich they cry. Idiots!

I am NOT rich, not even in the hinterland of comfortable. I worry about the bills that come in every month and I pray every time I start the car that it will work and I won't get a flat tire and nothing runs into me. But I do not want the rich fleeced.

I want them to spend. I want conspicuous consumption of quality, expensive, hand made products from right here in Britain. I want more people who are rich and busily demonstrating the fact to their rich friends. Why? Well obviously I want them to buy art - but anything will do. Handmade means more people working to make these things, whatever they are. They can enjoy spending and we can enjoy earning. How much less painful than some grubby little tax collector taking your hard earned cash away - with a snotty reminder not to be so successful. What would you do in their shoes? Exactly what I would do - find ways of not paying tax and leave the country. So then we all have to pay more.

Vince Cable's latest inanity proves the point - even more tax on something you have bought and maintained from already punitively taxed income. Nihilistic. If people, wealthy or not, have money left in their pockets they will tend to spend it - the government can then take its cut from the economic activity. Simply taking more and more of our money before we can use it to live is just asking for every corner of the economy to fail. When we are all on benefits who pays the taxes to pay the benefit? Cable even proposed that people should use equity release schemes to pay tax... how about the Government spending a lot less of our money and a lot more wisely?

Waiting Room

Noticed how the people who run this country have for the past decade talked about 'the ordinary people', 'average people'?? It sticks in my throat. It is patronising and reduces us, you, me and the millions that they no doubt feel should be grateful to be lead by them, to mere numbers, components in the faceless, heartless machine of 'society'.

We are not numbers - we all have our hopes, dreams, ambitions and fears. They may not matter much or seem very significant to people who believe themselves to be so terribly important but they DO matter and they are important to us and to those around us - to the 'society' that we are a part of. That society is not a machine to told what to do it is a crazy, chaotic, disorganised jumble of our emotional and illogical responses and our needs and fears as people.

Which brings me to the 'Waiting Room' - a group of deliberately stereotyped old dears, at first glance identical, coming and going to the line of seats in the waiting room. Is it a waiting room in the hospital? Or waiting to leave this life? They all have their numbers - the system has them tagged. Look a little closer and they all have their own peculiarities, a little vanity, a politically incorrect vice - a small act of rebellion. Except one, on the left hand side - totally conventional and simply accepting the state she is in, without hope. The counterpoint is the defiance in the figure leaving, looking up, taking a drag on her cigarette.

To me we must act - cry for our freedoms and believe in our humanity before we all become like that accepting figure; a nation of sheep allowing ourselves to merely exist on the states cold charity.