Back to people. It’s always back to people. The default setting. Sometimes it’s people mediated through the eyes of another. The head at the top is a figure from a 19th century painting by Isidore Pils. Something about the look, the depiction of the skull under the skin. Did he ever really exist in the first place? Was he a western artist’s vision of the archetypal oriental? Then back to real life and a snatched 60 seconds (that’s all I ever get) of Middle Daughter engrossed

I couldn’t resist it. New year, new project. Driven by the one thing I regularly do not do enough of despite knowing that it is massively important for successful creativity. Confronting failure head on. Sketchbooks and journals are usually private; unpressured by threat of exposure, the artist is free to experiment and build up a catalogue of glorious failure as a platform to learning and progress. Sketchbooks are frequently only revealed after sanitising and cleaning. What