The Artist’s Notebook
The Artist’s Notebook
Paul Watson
Since 2008 The Artist’s Notebook has been Paul Watson’s studio journal containing notes on his ongoing artwork and related research, giving an insight into his creative process and artistic practice.
Latest Posts
A fragment of the first drawing from the session I managed to get my first 2026 session of life-drawing done this past weekend. I was trying to find a particular style of pencil work that achieved the result I wanted, which I didn’t...
This is my first post of 2026, the 300th post since I added this blog to my website back in August 2008, and we have just entered the 30th year of existence for this website (which was originally launched back in 1996). As a consequence...
This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the...
This is my contribution to December’s IndieWeb Carnival hosted by V.H. Belvadi on the subject where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030, just five short years from now? And my answer is that it’ll probably be pretty much the same as it is...
This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the...
The fabric of reality is fraying in England: the old queen is dead, a disgraced prince has been ousted by the new king, his older brother: Gormenghast is changing, and Gormenghast both relies on and demands nothing ever changing. The...
Opinion polling graph for the next United Kingdom general election (post-2024) from Wikipedia licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license In a post here back in 2020—entitled Albion: utopianism...
This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the...
The Hastings Borough Bonfire Society’s Torchlit Procession, October 2025. Photograph by the author. This weekend just past was the Hastings Borough Bonfire Society’s torchlit procession. I wrote about this last year in a piece called...
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I can make it easier for people to follow this blog. I usually post a link to any new blog post on my social media accounts, but it’s very easy for people to miss a single social media message...
Now that the evenings are getting dark earlier I feel more inclined to put some of my time aside to make a few changes to this website. I’m thinking of adding search functionality for this blog, as well as some ActivityPub functionality...
Back in 2020 I was discussing the out-of-print novel Albion by Brenda Vale and musing on what I’d taken from it, and I wrote: The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced everyone that you only get one chance to...
This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the...
View out from Agios Georgios Beach on Naxos. Photograph by the author. I’ve just returned from a fortnight-long holiday in Greece—a long weekend in Athens, followed by ten days on the island of Naxos—and I’m feeling fully relaxed for the...
Bacchanalia Beneath the Wind Turbines, by the author Back in July I wrote a post here called The futility of constructing a better past & the necessity of imagining a better future, the essence of which was a rant against (what seems to...