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
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...
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...
Artists often take photos of their exhibitions being put up, but never after they’ve been taken down: nothing to see here, please move along. Overall the Acid Renaissance: Arcana exhibition was a success. I sold five unframed giclée...
Detail of one of the drawings from the recent life-drawing session Yesterday I did my first life-drawing session since March this year. After a six-month break I felt I was a bit rusty at first, but it started to come back to me, and...
Today this blog turns seventeen years old, the first post being Welcome to the Journal posted at 12:23pm on Saturday 9th August 2008 (I never did finish that art project I wrote about in that first post). And while I don’t particularly...