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Posted in: new jersey by jack. most unexpectedly, after reading that long post, i looked out my window trying to get back to my simple and happy world, and lo and behold there on my barren deck was a pot of flowers that had started to bloom again. i don't know how it happened, there were flowers in that pot in early spring and now they bloomed all over again. so you see people, if you bloomed once, there is a good chance that you can bloom again. just don't expect too much from the world, no one ever said the world owed you anything, and you don't owe the world anything, you only owe yourself and your family. so try to find the simple life, the happy life, a carefree life and a life strengthened by your church. look at the flowers that once were gone but now have returned. you too can come back.

Posted in: St. Leonards, Sussex, UK by Paul Baines. Shameless self-promoter and art impresario Bainsey aka Paul Baines, a new face on the UK iconic art scene, (yes it's me), and after getting in a heap of trouble for emailing the editor I've managed to get my head together enough to do this the right way. Click the 'big old link' marked 'post' and post the damn article. Sorry Peter. If you want to know what the hell I'm rabbiting on about take a look at my work at paulbaines.co.uk So here I am, first things first, sure I can be a Banksy wannabe (if you want me to be - as long as you buy my work) - the point is it's actually my name, I was called Bainsey at school, it stuck for a few years, I dropped it, call this a resurrection, you're never to old for a nickname. It's less formal, I've always hated my name, what can you do? Deed poll or die I suppose. Besides, at least it isn't Gunningham. Down to brass tacks, according to my UK fans, the few who know of my work - it's something like 'a meeting between Banksy (there's that guy again) and Warhol in social commentary hell'. I paw through pop iconography like most would pr0n, I splice it with a heavily political subversive tone, add a dash of controversy, and voilà , another Bainsey. Yes I am flippant (until the secret police take me away) and yes I am potentially another media wh0re waiting in the sidelines. The point is most artists are, they are just too proud to admit it. The other big difference is that I can actually think, speak and write, I'm as much a fan of philosophy and the intellect, the resonance of meaning and being, as I am of the visual arts. Read the blog section to view some of my rants in action. I don't hold back, I have nothing to lose, I have in fact nothing. I'm scraping my way to the very outer edge of the public's consciousness because I want to sell my work. That's a no-no in the arts world to, well it was until Damien Hirst hit the scene, if you love plutocracy, he is your man. I can't afford diamonds, I'm not secretly friends with a silent collective of rich bankers, I'm just a guy, burned out by London, inspecting my navel, and showing you the fluff. I've caused a few ripples already mind you, there was 'Black Christ', the first in the Indoor Street Art series, that's confused a few people in its short life on earth. No, I don't believe that Barack Obama is the Second Coming, he's a good man, as far as I can tell, but show me a human being who isn't in politics for the power and I'll show you a saint. Essentially I'm digging at the media, an ongoing theme in almost all my works, I don't trust them and they don't trust me, hence my obscurity, hence my near total non-existence in the arts world, hence this article. The media feed off bad news, good news doesn't make the headlines on a front page, you won't see your favourite program cut short for a 'good news bulletin', if you have you must be living in a religious cult and watching a local cable feed. Barack is a potential media martyr, all the signs are there, you can see it, you can feel it, the mass-media are for the main part scavengers, picking at the carrion of fallen stars. If you think there's nothing more to me than a shameless opportunist, you're not far wrong, I haven't always been this way, I've spent literally decades absorbing the world and my actions have been so imperceptible you'd swear I was frozen in time. Over the last few years my temporal idyll was disturbed by an infrequent chemical imbalance (as various psychologists have told me), I've twice attempted suicide, the second time was as close to death as you'd care to get, I wasn't in a coma as such, but I did spend three days as someone else. I slept through the whole event, although my eyes were open, I'd regularly call nurses by the wrong names, and argue with them about circumstances that neither of us would ever consciously understand. Here's what happened. I'd suddenly aged a few decades, from the technology around me, such as old-fashioned beige telephone modems housed in large plastic couplings of the same colour, indeed all the technology around me was beige. The monitors had green screens and only produced text, there was no Windows (yet). There were several tubes inserted in my body, a heart monitor, a motorised adjustable hospital bed, and a family I'd only begin to recognise on the third day. They were all disappointed in me, terribly disappointed. I had a grown up son and daughter and an elderly wife who must have been hitting her mid-sixties. They insisted on recounting the time I'd tried to commit suicide in the 1970's, which didn't make any sense at all. I'd have been a child then. It seems I had survived another drug overdose, i had been a successful banker, although the 'real' me couldn't bank to save my life. I'd bought a lovely retirement home in Israel and could see the desert mountains in the distance through a plush wide-expanse of glass. An unused swimming pool lay stagnant and salty in the distance, and beyond that gardeners were attending to a vast succulent and cactus-laden terrace. I apologised to my new-found family and returned to my 'real life'. I recovered, I spent a fair few months recovering in fact, talking through everything under the sun with counsellor after counsellor, they for the most part feared I'd never regain my grip on reality, perhaps they were right, I am still not sure to this day. Still, here I am, a few decades younger, poorer, and without the family or scars of repeated invasive surgery all over my body. That's when I realised I couldn't be a graphic designer anymore, I had to return to a practice I had abandoned many years before, the arts. This is in essence the whys and wherefores of why I must enter the public consciousness, I have an angle, a perspective of the dead, an urge to continue to dismantle the processes that make our perceptual-based consciousness, and furthermore the mass-consciousness that we conform to, be it society, media, the interplay of political regimes and plutocracies, not so much a conspiracy as an outright insult, give the movers and shakers of this world your belief, your hopes, your soul, and in return receive little more than the refuse and bi-products of an elitism drained of enthusiasm, originality and persistence of thought. We, the mass-consciousness subsist in a severed and fragmented culture, a sinister age of conformity bound by the order of fashion. I am extremely unfashionable, I am a coherent artist who finds pleasure in mocking those who potentially hold the key to my freedom from the banality of my personal suburbia, my indulgence in mass-consumption, and the limitations of my (most likely) short-lived mortality. I have and am nothing, that is my armour, that is my weapon. I have no allegiance bar my trusted partner, no possessions, no position in society, I am both harmless and dangerous, depending on your position in the empirical power structure that is society. If you think I should survive you can contribute in some fashion, financially, through influence, or merely in allegiance. If not I'll most likely need to see you in the next life. Thanks for your time -- like I say -- read the blog. paulbaines.co.uk/blog/