Gaza Body Bag RCA 24/25 Cancelled art work. Granite, paint, rope wool, cadaver bag.
‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.’ Pablo Picasso
Sitting at my desk in view of these great mountains. I feel calm and relaxed but aware of an impending tempest creeping toward me. I’m ordering canvases and pigment paid for by my host. I wonder how these nascent feelings will make themselves known.
I can’t help mulling over my time at the RCA. If I hadn’t been on anti depressants these past five years I would have reacted very badly to the way I was infantilised by the tutors at the RCA.
I might have laid on the floor and screamed like the baby they thought they were poking.
Sitting in the office like a naughty boy because… I didn’t say ‘they’ rather than she. Because… I took up wall space. Because… I chose a 9 by 9 canvas to paint. Because I had frank conversations about sex. Their beady eyes, condescending eyes… enjoying their opportunity to admonish the confident, award winning, accomplished film maker and performance artist. I felt like I was in a petting zoo with these curious animals nipping at me to see what I was made of.
Goading me. Will he strike back?
Ok, I made a deep dive into the fetid world of academia. I escaped… and am happy to breath fresh, mountain air. In all my days I had never been in such a toxic, competitive environment.
‘Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.’ Andy Warhol
I started taking anti depressants after I contracted covid in 2020. I stopped taking anti depressants the month before last. The veil lifted. The brain shocks took a while to fade. I want to fuck again… I began having deeper, less controlled emotions. I am far less patient and very snappy. Regardless of all this… I am pleased to be back in the world of full fat feelings… with a solid desire to express myself. Somehow I was less motivated to write and make art when I was under the chemical cosh.
Ross and others shared they were on anti depressants. I wonder what their art would be without the mind altering drugs?
I have been in and out of hospitals for decades… as and when my mental health gets the better of me. The longest time I spent in hospital was a whole year. The mentally ill are far better understood now, than we used to be. However, I never really felt my mental health was taken seriously in the RCA petting zoo. Did they expect me to be rational?
The angry Chinese guy who challenged me after my first RCA blog raised an interesting point. He suggested… I didn’t want to learn anything at the RCA and just applied to the school for ‘validation’. The first part is easily debunked. The second part of his comment is more interesting. Do I crave validation?
Well, yes… I do. I write to be read. I paint to be appreciated. I crave applause from the audience. I desire film reviews. The tears and laugher from those who watch me tell my story (flay myself) at an AA meeting. I love when people comment on my blog. I love the attention… good and bad.
That boy threatened to ‘drag’ me and I came in my pants. I love it when you tell me I’m a great cook. I love it when you praise my garden and the way I decorate my house, the art I have chosen.
I am unashamedly a validation junkie… I faint with pleasure when you hate me as vigorously as you love me.
I am the jouster and a jester… a validation junkie.
‘Art isn’t about the creator, what they think, or how they interpret their own work whether it’s poetry, music, or paintings. It’s about the spectator and how they interpret it.‘ Oscar Wilde
As the RCA recedes and the people I met… who I didn’t know a year ago, I will not remember a year from now. I can scarcely remember men I have had months long relationships with.
I am a stone skimming over the surface of life. I have little interest in knowing people for long. To meet them once is enough. Or to boast… I was there.
10 convivial moments.
I saw Joni Mitchell play Fez under Time Cafe on Lafayette in NYC. 1995
I saw Ivan Lendl play Boris Becker, Wimbledon. 1986
I stomped divots with the H.M. The Queen on Smiths Lawn. 1984
I had dinner with Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams and Ian Drew after a private Prince concert at The Roosevelt Hotel. 2007
Fred Hughes introduces me to Andy Warhol at The Factory. 1985
Rufus Sewell calls as I am driving my F150 up the PCH from Malibu to Topanga. Our friend and massage therapist DL discovered our friend Heath Ledger dead in his bed. DL doesn’t alert 911, DL calls Ashley Olsen. 2008
Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard with Ricky DeMarco. 1988
Dinner with Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, his wife and daughter at The Mercer describing the moment Timothy Geitner calls, the banks are failing, asking what to save: The people or the banks? 2015
New Years Eve, Mercer Kitchen dinner with Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Sporty Spice, Fran Leibowitz, Alan Cumming, Calvin Klein, Martine McCutcheon and Matt Goss. 1999
Province Town, my birthday party thrown by Michael Cunningham. Guests include Jennie Livingstone, Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Friedman, John Derian, Ken Fulk. 2015
I don’t currently have communication with any of the people mentioned above. I don’t need to. I knew them as much I needed to know them, at the precise moment I met them. I didn’t need to go to Wimbledon again, I didn’t need to know Sporty Spice… and she didn’t need to know me.
Although… quite unexpectedly, I was taken to the home of Joni Mitchell by her ex husband on Laurel Canyon the night we thought we saw Elizabeth Taylor dining at the Chateau. It wasn’t Elizabeth.
Jennie Livingstone Provincetown MA 2015
The friends I have are on borrowed time. I will know them… until I tire of them. I suppose that’s why gay life suited me, the transitory nature of gay life, one night stands… casual sex… anonymity. The social mobility of my gay life, one day a Duke another a dustman. Listening to their stories then passing on… cum in my beard.
This is why AA suited me… the constant flow of desperate people with desperate stories flushing through the rooms of AA. Never settling, skimming… like me, over the surface of life.
This is why Hollywood suited me, meeting people but never engaging with them for anything than the duration of the ‘meeting’. I am at Leo’s house showing my movie in his very own cinema… I will never see him again. I am on Malibu Pier with Jen and Brad having breakfast… I will never see them again. I am walking with Channing on the beech… I will never see him again. All I am left with is the story of a fleeting moment and that’s all I want to be left with.
I was at the RCA with Xavier, I’m bound to say… when he is a huge star. ‘We drank hot chocolate made with oat milk at Parker’s as he fretted over which major gallery to sign with.’
Gaza After Guernica 2024/25 RCA Paper Graphite Oil Stick
2.
Every day I see the most atrocious, sickening and heartbreaking images from the killing fields of Gaza. The mass murder curently happening in my name to the people of Palestine. Kids murdered. Kids starving. Kids full of hope over a bag of lentils then shot in the head. A five year old child shot in the head holding a bag of lentils.
The UK government is fully complicit in these murders. Starmer, our sinister Zionist leader, makes dreary, unemotional speeches promising action but does nothing. He and other European leaders like Macron, are making Israel’s genocidal dream come true. I tried to address this in my work at the RCA but it was removed by Harold Offeh, like the work of another anti Israel artist Zina Karaman… controversial elements of her work removed by the staff.
Art. Making art. I just donated 40 years of diaries to a national diary archive. The rest of my archive and all of my finished movies are held at the UCLA Library Film & Television Archive.
I have never stopped making work. Perhaps my most audacious artistic endeavour is this blog. First a diary… now a blog. There are huge gaps I am trying to fill, playing catch up writing the missing years by hand.
My friend has an atelier I will use as my studio. Tomorrow I’ll clear it out. I want to finish the series of black paintings. Paintings to remember the burned Malibu garden.
Cactus Tree
by Joni Mitchell
‘There’s a man who sends me medals He is bleeding from the war There’s a jouster and a jester And a man who owns a store There’s a drummer and a dreamer And you know there may be more I will love them if I see them They will lose me if they follow And I only mean to please them My heart is full and hollow Like a cactus tree…’
Embroidered Drones Silk Satin RCA 2025 30 cm x 15 cm
Contemporary Art Practice is situated on the second floor of the RCA Studio Building, Battersea, South West London. This is where I’ve spent the last eight months… unpacking my thoughts and feelings, trying to make sense of a richly creative life, just at the very end… when most men are retiring, I wanted to squeeze the very last of myself from the tube.
At the RCA open day I was shown around the brand new Herzog and de Meuron Studio Building by Contemporary Art Practice (CAP) student Stuart Lee and Head of Programme Chantal Faust.
Chantal has a huge presence, she is elegant, enigmatic and has immense charm. I asked her directly how she thought an older person might fit in, would get on at the RCA? Chantal assured me I would be just fine. It was because of Chantal’s assurance I applied for a place. You see, Chantal Faust demands respect. Like so many students before me I was immediately and unexpectedly in awe of her… I would willingly be the best person I could be… for her.
I was accepted onto the course and arrived in September ’24 but almost immediately my beautiful dream was compromised. Chantal Faust had been appointed The Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, she would leave CAP immediately for her new role leaving Jordan Baseman temporarily to rule the roost.
I’d learned many years ago an expectation was a resentment waiting to happen.
Jordan Baseman.
The first time I met Jordan it quickly became apparent he was nothing more than an argumentative contrarian… my worst nightmare. Formerly, this sour little man was head of sculpture at the RCA but I couldn’t find out why he left this prestigious role.
I should have withdrawn from the course as soon as I heard Chantal Faust was no longer at the helm but I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Forced to choose between Jordan Baseman’s CAP or… returning to caring for my Whitstable friend Georgina ravaged with Parkinson’s Disease.
Despite Baseman, I set aside my resentments and got on with the work. I arrived every morning at 9am and left at 10pm when the studio closed. I worked compulsively… blowing up this blog, ripping apart the language and locations of my queer life. Holding the past 60 years by the throat. Erasing and repairing. I took the AA 12 steps and vandalised them…
Out of the 100 or so on the course it quickly became apparent that only a few, maybe 20 students, were as committed as I imagined all students would be.
I learned how to cast bronze, machine embroider, scan images and blow them up, knit and weave Jacquard, paint on canvas… I explored AI and learned how to manipulate existing digital images. I felt unstoppable.
I settled into studio life and despite the disappointments my experience of making work was joyful. I loved the daily interactions with my cohort. I loved the conversation with those who could speak English or who bothered coming in, the exuberance, the love and inclusion. I was made to feel welcome and loved. I felt, through my work, a closer connection to God.
After a few weeks, buoyed by my enthusiasm, I foolishly went to see Jordan Baseman and tentatively asked if he was interested in the successful people I knew in the art world with a view to asking them to maybe give an informal talk. I mentioned a name. Baseman looked like I had thrown acid into his face.
“Why would we want to meet a dinosaur like that? We’re not interested in the commercial art world here.”
He just couldn’t help himself. I have rarely been so taken aback. I felt it very personally. Oh… so I’m a dinosaur.
When I shared with him during the same conversation I had a new appreciation of Francis Bacon he scoffed, he said he never wants to hear a student laud a dead artist like Francis Bacon.
I told him I found the process therapeutic. More scoffing. He wanted me to know, ‘we don’t do art therapy.’
Although he didn’t fuck with me during a crit, I heard from others he was vicious when he thought he could get away with it.
When it was time to be assigned my personal tutor… guess who I was lucky enough to get? Jordan fucking Baseman. Dr. Dutch Alex also had enough of Baseman so we both complained and were reassigned Dr Vivienne Griffin.
Jordan Baseman is also in his 60’s. In spite of his desire to cast a deep shadow over my experience I took the dinosaur insult and ran with it… for both of us.
I began introducing the image of the dinosaur into my work, firstly I designed and commissioned… a black… heavy duty… nylon… 9’ tall, inflatable dinosaur which, from behind, looks like a giant butt plug/dildo. Fuck you Dino. Dinosaurs showed up in my painting, my embroidery, my drawings.
Separately, I realised everything I’d considered important I needed to sweep away. The highly structured way movies needed to be written, the competitive collaboration with other writers in writers rooms. None of that seemed relevant to this new way of life.
I referred, instead, to my time making performance art in the 80’s. I wanted to make a connection with the artist I was then, Making The Host, Bad Baby, Copper’s Bottom, Pornography, a Spectacle etc. Perhaps I wanted to connect to a simpler time, a time of unencumbered, youthful enthusiasm… when nothing seemed impossible.
As I was merely lodging in London I brought my clothes into the studio and my space became, unwittingly, the focus of my work. The wardrobe, the closet, to be hidden in and revealed from. Garment bags morphed into Body Bags by way of the continuing Israeli mass murder in Gaza.
I erased Elizabeth Hurley from the film I made with her. Digitally… scene by scene.
If I expected any formal teaching… forget it.
As much as I tried I couldn’t shake the feeling all of this work was in vain. I couldn’t… with an open heart share my most personal work with Baseman, the thought made me nauseous, fearful and angry.
As for the other staff? I’m assuming with no clear course leadership they seemed lacklustre and uncertain. With the exception of Anne Duffau, George (?), a couple of visiting lecturers and the brilliant, inspiring artist in residence Aditya Pande (who had his own serious issues with the way he was treated). The rest of the staff were utterly parched. Intellectually desiccated.
Mel Brimfield for instance hated me because I called a work ‘Blood, Shit and Cum’ and when I insisted during a crit the mute Chinese people have an opinion… OMG, she didn’t like that one little bit.
Then there was harpist and John Cage derivative Vivienne ‘they/them’ Griffin who lectured me for 45 minutes (during my tutorial… one of four per annum) about taking up too much wall space and why white men and the patriarchy always do…
Vivienne seemed surprised I had cast the bronze elements in my work.
She sneered, “I thought you were the kind of person who would pay to have this made for you.”
Vivienne, who I recognised from AA, I had so much hope. Until she mocked my ‘dramatic’ greeting. It’s true, I threw my hands up with joy and called out her name when I saw her. She seemed to hate my gayness? I wasn’t ‘queer’ enough for Vivienne. I’m obviously an old, old fashioned gay. It felt sometimes like they were forcing me back into a closet. But the reality was/is they simply couldn’t understand this old gay man and made no effort.
When I hear the word dramatic used pejoratively to a gay man, I hear… faggot.
Most revealingly Vivienne noted I had achieved what most artists hoped to achieve. The awards, the plaudits and the exposure. She asked, why? Why are you here? What do you expect to achieve with me?
Some of them referred to me at a ‘mature student’.
“Nope…” I said, “Just a student.”
They were casually ageist without seeming to know it because somehow ageism slipped their mind in their cannon of woke protections… maybe slipped their inclusivity training or maybe they were just too busy they/theming to listen to the ageism bit on zoom… or nipped out for a £10 juice baby just before the old fart part.
Their ageism repulsed me. They hated the idea… old people had sex, talked about sex, enjoyed sex. The cult of daddy repelled these rich kids. Was I alone? Nope, It wasn’t just me, many of the older students across all departments were treated very badly by fellow students and staff alike.
I consoled myself Jordan Baseman was a wounded soul and generally vile to all… so I shouldn’t take it personally. He is a break them down and build them up kinda guy. He was cruel to Finn and Michael and the older dutch woman whose name escapes me (Alex?). Like… theatrically cruel. We listened at the door as he and Michael screamed at each other in the staff room.
A few weeks into the course Baseman was magically replaced and without explanation by Dr Harold Offeh as programme head. Two programme heads in as many months.
Harold, oh dear, is the kind of artist who simply doesn’t register as an artist. He should be running an infant school. Harold, tied up in they/them politics, takes endless pics of himself: thin, fat, clothed… wobbling about naked in videos. A mouth full of ping pong balls. Yeah…
The David Lammy of the RCA.
Obviously, Dr Harold is not someone could inspire me nor who I would want to bring the best of myself. He ruled with a floppy fist. Laughing at his own jokes. Someone described him as an ’empty well’. Harold dashed any hope I might have had the CAP circus would get better now he was the ring master.
His attempts to infantilise were astonishing. On more than one occasion I advised him to watch his tone. I sat in meetings with him thinking… do you know who I am you dumb prick? Yes! That’s what I thought. I’ve been consistently achieved, awarded and respected for my work and you are speaking to me like I’m a fucking child.
I thought I better look at his art. Oh dear. His awful mediocre ‘art’ and I knew…
Meanwhile, after a few weeks of painting and drawing huge dinosaurs Baseman had a big fat target on my back. It was not a comfortable place to be but if I could get to the degree show in July I knew I would be ok. Communication broke down steadily between me and Harold Offeh as he attempted to refute Baseman calling my friends dinosaurs, defended Griffin’s appalling waste of my tutorial and made me explain (inexplicably) why I had decided to paint a 9′ x 9′ painting.
As a result of these interactions I covertly recorded every conversation I had with all of them.
I occasionally bumped into Chantal. After her poorly attended lecture I made some of the best work I’d make at the RCA. There is something about her delivery, her compassion and intelligence that inspired me out of my hum drum thinking… and into action.
As the final show drew closer the atmosphere in the studio became very tense. I had to share a gallery space with Ming… of course I did. And of course Offeh made me change the work we had agreed for the final show. Apparently the Gaza body bags were ‘offensive’. By the time of the degree show rolled around… I really didn’t care. I’d refused to pay my fees and knew it was only a matter of time before I would leave.
I scarcely bothered with the show. I’d reserved the best of me. Held myself back from Jordan, Harold, Mel etc. I didn’t show the inflatable dinosaur. I didn’t buy the mechanised carousel. I knew I would have other opportunities.
As for the show? Let’s put it this way… nobody came. Compared with the Painting Department which was rammed with celebrities and collectors, we got the dregs and by dregs I mean other students.
We were promised collectors from the Tate, what we actually got was a bunch of white rich housewives giggling and confused. We were promised curators but they didn’t show up. I’m sure if Chantal had been there to greet them it would have been a different story.
To fairly share the Painting Department’s heat, it would have made better sense to curate from all departments for the degree show (Print, Jewellery, Painting, Ceramics, CAP, Sculpture etc.) across The Dyson and The Studio Building… like an art fair.
I suggested this to one of the senior staff who told me they’d tried this idea a few years ago. Apparently the public loved it but the staff didn’t. The staff didn’t like the chaos and the fuss. Are you kidding me? The staff couldn’t be bothered? There’s a frigging curatorial studies department who could have curated the whole event rather than commissioning a bunch of mediocre external artists for the best and most spacious gallery in the building.
2.
I’m sitting on the 5th floor of the RCA in Kensington overlooking the campest public sculpture in London: The Albert Memorial. All gilded florishes and flowing robes and whiskers. A great love token from his grieving wife Queen Victoria. Our very own Taj Mahal. The golden prince was painted black during the second world war to safeguard the memorial and the nearby Albert Hall from German air raids.
As a young man, maybe when I was at Medway College of Art finishing up my foundation, I would pass the RCA in Kensington and look up at the many floors knowing how lucky the students were to be making and creating and painting…. that only the best and brightest came to the Royal College and were offered a golden ticket to life. As golden as Prince Albert sheltered under his memorial canopy.
I knew I would never get there… not then. Not because I wasn’t good enough… I believed then, as I do now, I could do anything if I set my mind to it. Yet, sadly the moment had passed and I was on a journey which could never make room for such an indulgence.
My friends who visited the RCA commented on the huge number of Chinese students at the College. It was cynically noted by a member of staff the Chinese students at the RCA are treated as cash cows.
Someone, he said, had to pay for the brand new building by Herzog and de Meuron. The money had to come from somewhere… right? Many of the Chinese students could not speak English and one wonders how they managed to pass the English language exam to get on the course?
During our mandatory ‘Across RCA’ module we were teamed with students from across the three RCA campuses: Battersea, White City and Kensington. The majority of the students were from China. Very few of them could speak english at a level required to complete many of the tasks. Under the heading ‘Social Justice’ Nanci and I chose Propaganda and Censorship as our theme. None of the Chinese student joined our group. One of the Chinese students took me aside and said in broken English he couldn’t join our group because he wanted to return to China. He was scared of being reported to the Chinese authorities by a fellow Chinese student.
At the Offer Holders Event in Kensington… I met Mingzhang Sun. With elbow length hair and robes by Issy Miyake, Ming cuts quite a dash. His work however… meh. Torn canvas and rope over painted stretchers…
Because Ming had lived in the UK for a decade or so, he thought he knew about the vagaries of the English language. So when I used a colloquial term Mingzhang wasn’t familiar, he mocked me suggesting I’d made it up. I asked the English people close to us to confirm ‘a bird in the hand’ was indeed an english expression. Ming advised me not to use ‘old english’ if I expected to be understood. I laughed in his face… that didn’t go down well with silly, scowling Ming.
Is he a they? I can’t remember.
At the final show a dear friend of mine told Ming to stop being so rude to me. Like an impoverished drag queen he made a theatrical apology.
I’m loving these responses from angry, queer Chinese people. Hmmm… They don’t speak English ‘differently’ they don’t speak English at all… which makes the group activities like crits and group discussion very frustrating for those of us who do. The Chinese students sit silently, unable to join in. They stick to themselves and do not ‘grow’. Can they spontaneously articulate thoughts and feelings coherently without using the translator app?
You’ll notice in the critique below he/she refers to me ‘leaking’ private conversations. That is sooo…. Chinese.
By the way, I would love to be ‘dragged’ if you know what I mean.
I want to honor the RCA technicians from whom I learned so much. The real stars of the RCA.
I want to thank the absurdly handsome Ian Stoney who taught me how to cast bronze. Tuning me into the last ten thousand years of lost wax casting. Ian and his glamorous studio colleague Kirsty Wood were always eager and helpful and meticulously taught me and others how to make the best of our ideas and ourselves.
I want to thank Simon Ward in photography who made himself available to every single member of the cohort at all times and printed beautifully with the equipment available to him. He is the most polite and kindest men. It is always a delight to hear him across a crowded room call your name and make you feel welcome.
I want to thank Claudia Espart Hernandez in the printing department who UV printed my black body bags… even though she was obviously repelled by them. Good job Claudia.
Thank you to Thom Costello and Debby Stack and Sophie Manners in the textile department who changed my life with their embroidery and Jaquard machines. Textiles became the place I wanted to be. It was gentle and calm.
3.
Toward the end of the second term the playful kids on the course who at first amused me began to shatter my nerves. It was my friend Douce who pulled me to one side and asked why, whenever she saw me was I helping others achieve their goals and not mine? Spending hours having my hands scanned for Ramone (brilliant but troubled Christian) or helping a young photographer… or getting another artist a huge commission… which he resented doing? I laughed at Douce’s suggestion I should be more selfish… then Anditya had the same observation.
I felt like I was being sucked dry.
The old dinosaur ruthlessly cut them off. When I did so… I began to hear nasty gossip. Ross was saying unpleasant things about me. The vampiric Ross with his irritating ‘competitive curiosity’, the golden boy with his golden locks and weird obsession with snails… nope.
Gone.
Alex Pillen, the Imperial professor complained I owed her money and started quizzing others about me. This gossip blew up in her face. Thankfully, Ramone kept me abreast of the tittle tattle.
It wasn’t always thus. Alex was very helpful after I got my horrible and shocking skin diagnosis. When I met her I thought she was a delightful woman who showed me beautiful pictures of her gorgeous Italian country holiday house. Her fibre art is superb and because of her I discovered Japanese yarns.
The ‘they/them’ Mary. Silver feathers? Fuck. Never a good or competant artist, regardless she was also a good friend until she manufactured a drama. Or ‘on the spectrum’, red haired, gluten free, country kid Hannah who called me a fraud…. this talentless moron is scarcely worth writing about.
Oh yeah, and then there is the spotty, spotty, spotty and agist Viola B who hates white men but came dressed as one for her final show… who attempted to have me expelled for talking about sex… what a cunt.
After meeting the guy I was seeing Viola told me she thought older men dating younger men was disgusting. She complained I took pictures at public events. What a cunt. This kid lectured me about graphic designers not being real artists… never becoming artists, when I corrected her… suggesting Warhol for instance, she became vicious and called me a cunt.
Viola = Karen
Much more about HER next time.
With no clear direction, no effective or charismatic leadership at the end of the second term the cohort began to implode.
Whilst Lord of the Flies was unfolding on the second floor of the Studio Building I hid in the painting department with people who took themselves and their work more seriously.
Me and Billy at his Lehmann Maupin opening NYC 2015
I met Wild Billy Childish (William Hamper, Stephen Hamper) in September 1977. We met in the lobby of Medway College of Art, the first day of our Foundation Course and pretty much lived in each others pockets that year up on the hill overlooking Chatham and beyond.
I commuted from Whitstable to Chatham on the train wearing my mother’s green woollen tights and various punk get-ups. Braving a torrent of abuse. Bill was in a band called the Pop Rivets and interviewed Polly Styrene for his fanzine. He knew about Kurt Schwitters and German Expressionism and wood cutting and Celine’s Death On The Instalment Plan. He was very generous with what he knew and I was hungry to learn it.
When we left Medway… after a ten year pause we were friends for pretty much two decades. We collaborated on my performance art posters and I bought art from him when I had the money and he needed it.
I think he sent me every book he ever published, every album he ever pressed… and I have every punk fanzine he produced at Medway. He was a machine. Painting, printing, writing, singing, playing the guitar.
Charismatic bad girls flocked to him.
Billy’s girlfriend whilst at Medway was a beautiful woman called Rachel Waller who, when she was done with Billy, married the Olympian Steve Ovett.
While we were at Medway, Billy and Rachel took me under their wing. He recognised another tormented soul and she wanted a gang. However, he could be unashamedly homophobic and treated women as he saw his dad treat his timid mother, June… not very well.
One night Billy and Rachel took me to dinner at the expensive Windmill Restaurant in Whitstable with some money his dad had given him. They missed the last train home to Chatham from Whitstable and my step father refused to let them crash at the house. I was mortified.
After we left Medway he went to St Martin’s School of Art and I lived in Paris and changed my name. We didn’t really speak until 1990.
I did not know Billy when he was married to Sheila although when I met Sheila recently at the RCA she showed me her Billy brand on her upper arm. The hangman tattoo. He married Sheila when he was still with Tracey Emin which devastated Tracey. He could be a real twat.
Billy’s dad was not a good man. Billy seemed all at once in awe of him and terrified. Billy was brought up in Walderslade, a genteel and affluent neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chatham. His parent’s house was well appointed, decorated with real art and art books.
Bill’s father wore velvet collared coats and his Mother, June was a potter. When I was a teenager I liked visiting Billy’s house because it was so different from mine. I thought to myself, Billy and his brother would never want for anything.
Billy is terminally nostalgic and even when we were kids Billy took teen me to old men’s outfitters in Rochester and made me buy braces and homburg hats and I willingly followed his lead. I was his clueless project and soon I was wearing ripped tweed, argyle and caps. He was without doubt (until I met Fred Hughes) my greatest style influence. He was so sure of everything he said and I believed in him. He was the surest 18 year old I had ever met. I would ever meet.
The time I knew Billy the best was when he was married to Kira and had his son Huddy. June moved to Whitstable from Chatham and I was invited to Sunday lunch every weekend for years. Sometimes it was the only proper food I had. As June roasted a chicken, boiled vegetables and made crumble I sat in her spare bedroom which doubled as Billy’s Sunday studio watching him paint. I lazily listened to him talk about painters and painting and Tracey. Always Tracey. I sat and listened to him talk about politics, his health, Peter Doig (who we both knew) but as Tracey gained traction in her career so Billy became more agitated. The Emin tent with his name appliquéd in it… her painting which he felt Tracey owed him a thank you, but rather than be grateful she described him as… stuck. So he created a movement around Tracey calling him stuck, which is what a narcissist does I suppose.
The truth is, Billy was stuck. Stuck in his ways, enslaved by routine. Intransigent.
He tolerated my theatre success. It didn’t mean anything to him but after I met Joe and bought the Peter Cushing house and started making movies he shared that he found my success deeply concerning.
“I never want to talk about your work and I won’t come and see your movies.”
It was at this time Billy became aware I was friends with Jay Jopling who I met in Edinburgh whilst I was working for Ricky DeMarco. Jay and his YBA circus. Jay often visited the cottage at 13 Island Wall in Whitstable and brought his star acts with him. Billy would ask for an introduction to Jay or a studio visit (as did all of my artist friends) but Jay who represented Tracey Emin at White Cube described Billy as ‘tricky’ and refused to meet him or see his work. I remember exactly where that conversation happened and how I dreaded telling Billy… Jay wasn’t interested.
It was his separation from Kira that showed Billy at his worst. Billy’s new American girl now wife Julie inserted herself into all of our lives and frankly, it didn’t feel very good. I liked Kira. She was firm but kind and I respected her authority.
After Kira left and Julie moved in I tried having lunch with them as usual but I couldn’t just pretend things hadn’t changed so I stopped having Sunday lunch with June, Billy and Julie. I continued buying his work. Things came to a head one Sunday afternoon when he visited the Cushing house with Julie and we got into some verbal argy bargy. I told him I thought the way he treated women was despicable. It was then, and only then, he threatened me with physical violence. Sometimes you see people exactly for who they are. Later that evening he called and apologised for his behaviour but it was too late… I had seen him.
I saw Billy recently at Frieze. He gave me a hug and said he thought he might see me. He told me to call.
I didn’t call.
Then, coincidentally I met Billy and Kira’s son’s Australian girlfriend who works in a gallery along side the RCA. Causing me to meet Huddy as an adult, an artist whose work is very similar in style to his father’s.
The last time I saw June she said,
“I’m 90.”
She died shortly after. I heard from Whitstable locals Billy didn’t visit very often.
All in all what do I feel about Billy now? We will continue to bump into each other. We are in the same orbit. I feel as if I was dumped when I saw the worst of him, but Billy never had the courage to tell me why he gaslights me.
I’m left with the paintings, the books the records and stacks of drawings. The paintings I have? Nobody really wants the old stuff. Billy now paints like he actually wants to sell his work. The early work… jarring colours and equally jarring subject matter now ditched for Doig like forests of silver birch and sunsets.
He painted me a cat. I said, “Can you paint it pink?”
I think he probably sneered… but he painted it anyway.
Blood, Shit and Cum Mixed Media Painted Intervention 2024/25 RCA 1.5m x .5m
1964. M2 Motorway. Torrential rain.
Aunt Evelyn is emigrating to the USA. David, my Step Father, is driving us to Heathrow. The car is an adapted Citroen DS with seven seats he had borrowed from a friend. There are nine of us in the car. Evelyn, her small children Mark and Miranda, me, my two year old brother Stuart, my Mother, David, my Grandmother and Grandfather. 5 adults and 4 children.
David is 24 years old. Driving too fast in the torrential rain, he hits a a sheet of running water and aquaplanes over the central reservation into oncoming traffic. He crashes head on into a dentist travelling south who is immediately killed. I am sitting on my Mother’s lap in the front passenger seat. Upon impact I hit the windscreen, through the glass, out of the warm car, into the cold rain and onto the wet verge.
Silence. My skull smashed. Lying in the grass. Rain on my face. I remember hearing my Mother’s voice.
“I think he’s dead.”
No, I’m not. I thought. I’m not dead. I’m alive.
I remember the ambulance. Sitting opposite my aunt. Her legs were bleeding. There was a lot of blood. Over all of us. My clothes were sticky with blood. I’m wearing tartan trousers. The ambulance was just a van with broken people sitting on benches opposite each other.
We all survived the accident. There were so many of us in the car, packed like sardines. No seatbelts.
I remember telling the nurses at the hospital I didn’t sleep in a cot at home. I slept in a real bed.
I stayed in hospital for 20 weeks. I have no recollection of those months in hospital.
Four years later I am staying with my Grandmother. I am 8 years old. My Grandfather had died of an asthma attack beside her. She set the table before we went to bed. The house always smelled of apples. I liked the room I stayed in when I stayed with her. I can hear her downstairs preparing breakfast.
The wardrobe was assembled from odd elements. A deep shelf hung with a curtain made of orange linen, patterned with black bull reeds. I loved rooting through her old things in the wardrobe.
Past her summer dresses and winter coats, buried deep under the shelf I found opaque garment bags. As I unzipped them I recognised immediately what they were. My dead Grandfather’s tweed suit covered in dried blood and mud. My own tartan trousers from the accident similarly covered in dried blood and mud. In all of the garment bags hidden at the back of the wardrobe were the clothes we were wearing the day we survived the terrible accident on the M2 Motorway.
I told my mother. When I returned, the bags were gone.
The next project I set myself at the RCA was to unpack the secrets of the wardrobe.
The first few weeks at the RCA were simultaneously very scary and utterly thrilling. Surrounded by so many new people. Negotiating space and time in an institution when the only institutions I have ever been in long term are hospitals.
The first term was full of exciting promise. I started as I meant to continue. At a pace. I needed to set aside my expectations and start by making sense of the past few years. Firstly, I wanted to address this blog as it has played such an integral part of my creative life.
So, I took important texts from the blog and blew them up to one and half meters by one meter and began either erasing or redacting or enhancing these huge new works on paper.
This research was never really meant for anyone than me but certainly helped make sense of this late term transition from film and words and structure to unstructured mark making. As I mentioned in an earlier blog I spent the previous year working with two young producers on two original screenplays.
One of the scripts I was particularly proud. Both screenplays were a tribute to the highly structured work I had been making these past decades.
Useless Man. Self Portrait 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
Then, through this work, I started looking at my life in AA these past 27 years I had devoted to sobriety. I felt angry with AA. Had it been a monumental waste of time? Am I an alcoholic? I had predicated so many of my most important decisions on my relationship with a cult? I had moved to LA. I had chosen my agent and manager and lawyer… because of AA. Ultimately I felt as if all I had really achieved was a race toward insanity buoyed by other insane alcoholics. Who could be the maddest manman in Madland ? I was a clear winner by far. As soon as I stepped away from the AA competitive madness I was free and consequently so much happier.
I still find myself drawn to crazy addicts and alcoholics. It’s the intensity of the connection, feeding my desire for more… me and my addict.
I set about erasing the 12 steps.
12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 1 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 2 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
12 Steps Erased (Triptych) 3 24/25 RCA 1m x 1.5m
I made a series of works addressing the horrors of the Gaza Genocide inspired by Picasso’s Guernica. Drawn over a blog description of my own decent into hell. The micro and the macro.
Easter 2024 I discovered an itchy, scaly rash on my buttocks and on the back of my legs. A routine trip to both the doctor and the STD clinic (was it Money Pox?) posited I had either Psoriasis or Eczema. Both conditions apparent in my immediate family. It didn’t really occur to me these diagnosis were not consistent and I should really have sought a third opinion.
By late January of this year and quite suddenly the painful and desperately itchy rash had spread all over my body and I woke up to specs of dried blood all over the sheets and pillowcases. I tried a little on-line diagnosis of my own and bought some scabies cream just in case. After two weeks the situation had become dire.
A trip to the dermatologist in Canterbury and a helpful doctor friend seemed to point in an altogether more sinister direction. The consultant immediately put me on a very heavy dose of steroids which, may have helped with my skin but my mood plummeted. The pills make me jittery and thirsty, I became snappy and impatient. The steroids catastrophically compromised my already shaky emotional and mental foundation.
I knew I had to get out of the RCA as soon as possible. I had to get out of the studio… as in this highly charged environment I was likely to say the wrong thing or react incorrectly to a bunch of much younger people who understandably could not easily empathise with an old man with a bad diagnosis.
The problem with Steroids (Alex my studio cohort and Anthropologist turned Artist told me) steroids have three emotional outcomes: Glad, Mad or Bad. Mine was decidedly bad and mad. I felt terrible.
After two biopsies things became a little clearer. Still not crystal clear… but much clearer. Although sinister there are two flavours of the same sinister. I will know the (bad or less bad) outcome on Tuesday 22nd April.
I fled to Portugal to be on my own. I’ve been sleeping until Midday every day since I arrived in the Algarve. My skin is healing for the most part, the pustules held back by the steroids.
I am less grumpy because I am totally isolated from other humans.
The spector of my insanity in retreat.
When I was happier I wanted to do a PhD: Artists and Insanity.
An article in the New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope uses the work of Martin Ramirez, an artist with schizophrenia, to ponder the well-worn perception that artistic creativity and mental illness are somehow inevitably linked.
Emotional disorders are not afflictions that sometimes come with built-in creativity. It’s time to kill this stereotype and the stigmatising statements that often come along with it.
We with mental health issues are still not understood when we present for the most part as normal. Like a trans person I seek to pass without being noticed until I am caught chatting to myself or saying things I wonder why… why did I say that?
It became obvious, very quickly… even though I had made my life-long mental health struggles very clear to the RCA administration before I arrived, my concerns were not being passed onto the correct department.
This may have had something to do with a messy transfer of power from the brilliant and enigmatic CAP head of department (now Dean) Chantal Faust to firstly Jordan Baseman then to Dr Harold Offeh.
Crucial information was not communicated. Two long term hospitalisations in psychiatric hospitals, ongoing mental health care, a massive head injury when I was a child. There really wasn’t any kind of support or help from the College.
I suppose, because for the greater part of my life, I manage my condition.
I am used to going as far as I can before the wheels come off but after a couple of incidents (I will write about these at a later date) I begged the student union for help. Help came in the form of a very level headed guy who talked me through what was happening.
When I discussed my health I found the staff in my department prone to infantilisation. They looked at me with fixed, wide eyed grins as if they were placating a baby.
I mean… they are just artists. They are not doctors, they are not therapists. I understand they were just trying their best.
So I wrote to Harold Offeh the head of CAP and told him I desperately needed to get away because I knew I was holding back a dam of emotions that could not afford to break at the college.
If I were epileptic and had a seizure… how would they react? A seizure is very scary for other people. It is confusing. It can be triggering.
That’s what mental illness looks like. It is something I have struggled with all my life. Periodically I can hold my head above the water and get things done then I am dragged deep beneath the waves.
When I fight my way up again gasping for air… things were not as they were.
Malibu Fires RCA 2024/25 Acrylic and chalk on Canvas 2m x 2m
After a few years away from this diary I have decided, with so much going on… to make my thoughts and feelings public once again. I have a great deal to process, most notably the death of my darling Little Dog. The death of my brother Stuart, the destruction of everything in Malibu, the gruelling politics of fear now so widespread and the institution of The Royal College of Art.
So… let’s fire this baby up. See how she rolls.
In September 2024 I began the process of leaving Whitstable for the last time. On so many occasions I had resisted going back. I was living happily in Portugal in a lovely home and mostly enjoying my life post Covid, post near death experience.
The Little Dog was still alive but ailing.
I had visited Whitstable and made arrangements to stay with my dear friend who I found to be in deep trouble. Her late stage Parkinson’s Disease was limiting what she could do and despite her valiant attempts her life was shrinking. I returned to Portugal but she begged me to come help her. Yet again, I couldn’t say no. My alanonic codependency, my desire to fix… to interfere (masquerading as help) got the better of me.
So, I moved back to Whitstable where I took up the relentless task of caring for my friend with Parkinson’s Disease. It was a gruelling and thankless task. As much as I cared about and loved her, I hated the disease. I tried to create a safe and beautiful environment for her but by doing so made my own life very dangerous.
I cooked every meal. I sat beside her. I dabbed at her brow. I drove her, did the gardening, the laundry and unpacked the shopping. I really hoped God was looking down approvingly at this living amends.
However, I knew (apart from a container of possessions) I had no business being in Whitstable. Those I knew, had known all my life, would finish up their days in much the same way they had for half a century.
Return of the Native I am not.
In the past two decades I had lived in so many different towns of varying sizes before I returned to my ailing friend. I had lived In Hollywood, Malibu, Tivoli, NYC, Carmona, Tavira and bought land in Walford, Herefordshire… and each of those places with a varying range of money to play with I met the same kind of people. I met billionaires and paupers. I made 500k. I made nothing.
The same kind of people made themselves apparent in every town, in every city.
There was the return of the native on the hunt for answers, there is always a bent lawyer, a miserable divorcee… In every town there is a heartbreak. The same story. The same closeted sailor. The same rancid coke addict stinking of cheap, over cut drugs on their breath and skin.
In every town.
Every town has a respected few who have no damned reason to be respected, and a few who should be respected but never are. There’s always the blowsy blond who marries the local business man and drives a fancy car. There is the drug dealer and the dreamer and the goody housewife and those who live out their days crippled with debilitating illnesses.
There is a local girl with a head injury who just wants the best for everyone whose coworkers laugh at behind her back.
In every town there are a gang of thugs who get together on a Friday afternoon and eat sea food, drink too much and lie about the value of their jewelry.
The feminist art collective who draw each other badly.
There is always the lacklustre husband who returns to the barren ex wife he abandoned (cap in hand) from another who takes all his money but delivers three sons.
There is the 50 year old woman who writes to her boyfriend in prison for five long years but when he gets out he sleeps with her best friend and breaks her heart and her bank.
These dramas, unchanged since Dylan alluded to them from his sleepy Welsh village.
Whitstable. Wealthy married couples (gay and straight) buy terraced houses, hire fancy architects who strip out all non load-bearing walls revealing ‘volumes’ and when they are done… install thick, white plastic plantation blinds, blinding the house from the street.
As Whitstable prospered (because of Oysters not yachting) so the local football team Whitstable Town became the toast of the local league. I had many a moment in those Belmont bleachers, under the rusty gasometer, when I was a kid. Every Saturday.
David Roy my step father played for the town, respected for his scissor tackles and party antics in the bar afterwards.
He always has a bottle of wine in the boot of his car for the ‘ladies’.
After nearly 3 years of devoted service to my friend something in me broke. I was gasping for air. Whitstable became a desert with nothing to drink. I was thirsty for change. Tied to the antics of my sick friend and her sicker family.
I applied to the RCA after my brother Stuart, died. My younger half brother. His death inspired me to get on with things.
A lifeline from heaven… the RCA accepted me and in September 2024 I started an MA in Contemporary Art Practice.
The first thing I did when I arrived and given the opportunity, I cut myself off from David’s name. I took the name I was born with… before David Roy adopted me or even knew my mother or me.
Duncan Paul Spark.
It hasn’t been easy owning that name… Spark. Even though I hate the name Roy and all it means, I am used to it. I am used to that name. My Mother applauded me for changing it.
Then, unexpectedly, my mother had a massive heart attack whilst looking after her grandson. He saved her life. Called the ambulance.
My Mother couldn’t believe her heart had given in. She berated the universe from her hospital bed.
“I’m not fat! Why did it happen to me?”
My Mother, with her boyfriend Martin, watch right wing news channel GB News. They wind themselves up fearing ‘the immigrants’. They have a particular fear of Turkish Barbers and Taxi Drivers who they believe are gifted their barber shops and taxis by the British government.
Then, in January 2024 my younger brother Stuart died. His heart gave up. He was two years younger than me.
Did you know he was jumped in Joy Lane? People… stopped their car, leapt out and the men punched him and the women hit him with their shoes.
Stuart was never the same. Unsurprisingly, he too struggled with his mental health. He was fearful and paranoid but refused to get help. He was sure they were out to get him. Run him down. Ever vigilent he told my mother they followed him, they were waiting for him to make a mistake so they could get him.
Stuart and his family left Whitstable and moved to a semi-rural part of Kent and kept goats.
Stuart didn’t want the doctor or the ambulance to come the night he got sick because he was sure they would come, hiding in the ambulance. It sounds terribly sad. His wife had begged him to call an ambulance but he refused.
A few weeks before Stuart died my Mother was staying with him (unable to be alone in her flat after her first heart attack) watching TV with Stuart’s wife and daughter.
My mother told me this story with the same crumpled face and indignant tone she had when she reminded me in the hospital she wasn’t fat and didn’t deserve a heart attack… she, is as it turns out, is perpetually indignant.
Anyway, they are watching TV and TV Chef Ainsley Harriet is preparing some mince meat. He is kneading the meat and breadcrumbs with his bare hands. My Mother says,
“Look at that, that’s disgusting, his black hands in the meat.”
The family were aghast. They told her she couldn’t say things like that. Even Stuart told her off. What? My Mother could not believe her son wasn’t defending her. He understood what she meant? Didn’t he? Had the world gone mad?
My mother was outraged they had challenged her racism.
Then Stuart died a couple of weeks later. And she said, rather coldly,
“Well, his paranoia got him in the end.”
Twenty or so years ago… and it might have been more. I was in a car with Stuart and he said,
“You know what David did to us. He should have gone to prison.”
“What did he do to you Stuart?” I should have asked. But I did not.
I froze. I stayed silent. It was a terrible betrayal. I betrayed him to keep my own position in the family as the only abused son, the only victim. I was not prepared to share! In fact, Stuart was giving me the opportunity to reach across decades of hurt and share some kind of support… or something. I did not. I stayed silent and we never spoke of it again.
I regret this terribly. I might have been the only person he could have spoken to.
On the order of service for his funeral there was a picture of him on a bench in his garden with his goats.
Goats on his lap. It made me cry but only when I couldn’t be seen.
I wrote two commisioned movies in 2024. One about a nuisence gangster and the other about an estranged brother and sister. I think one of them is getting made. We will see about the other one.
Oh, he’s a late bloomer they say.
In September 2024 at 64 years old I made the last, greatest bloom.
I went to the Royal College of Art to make conceptual art. From September 2024 to March 2025 I was perhaps the happiest person I have ever been. And, save for a few moments with occasional personalities, I kept on top of my resentments and anger and shame. I worked diligently in the school Herzog and De Muron designed and embraced every second of any chance presented to me.
I cast in bronze, I painted, I made sculptures out of body bags. I emroidered and knitted and painted some more.
In 2024 Palestine overwhelmed me. I had to stop looking at dead children in Gaza. I revisited Picasso’s Guernica to make a series of works in response to the horrors of Gaza.
Then, out of the deep dark ocean, two things happened in January 2025 which shook at my foundations.
The Palisades Fire began burning in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles County on January 7, 2025, and grew monstrous enough to destroy the Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu.
The fire was fully contained on January 31, after 24 days.
A series of wildfires in Southern California driven by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, burned 23,448 acres, killed 12 people, and destroyed 6,837 structures, making it the tenth-deadliest and third-most destructive California wildfire on record and the most destructive to occur in the history of the city of Los Angeles.
One of the 6,837 structures burned was the beautiful house on Hume Road, Malibu… along with all of my neighbours homes, burned to ash in the Palisades fire.
As of today I have not really processed this.
I have seen pictures and videos.
I have pictures of the house, the garden, the view and the dog. Everything in those pictures is gone. The view, the furniture and the beautiful garden I spent years and years tending and brush clearing and landscaping and loving and loving and loving.
Do you remember before I bought it? I would drive from Hollywood up Sunset the long way through Bel Air to Malibu and sit in the garden of a house I didn’t even own and look at the Ocean? It was so magical. Watching the hummingbirds dart into the fleshy white cactus flowers.
Malibu Cactus Flower Erased 2024/25 Mixed Media 1.5m x 1m
I could have bought the house in Silver Lake but I didn’t. That house is still standing. Hume Road looks like an atom bomb hit it.
Everything has gone.
That’s enough for now. There’s loads to write about. I’m here for another two weeks. I’ll try and write every day.
I’ve touched on some of the themes I’ll be exploring in more depth these coming weeks. Notably, my time at the RCA, looking after my friend, the death of The Little Dog and my health which seems, at long last, to be defeating me.
