I mentioned back on the very first day of this year that my friend Scott Wood and I were planning on setting up something around the “Hastings Weird”: There are some existing loose local networks/communities that I’d like to get involved with or am already getting involved with—both for the joy of being part of a...

The Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence. Photograph by the author. I’ve recently returned from a week’s holiday in Florence, a much-needed recharge for me, both artistically and to remedy my exhaustion from my day job. I have visited Florence before, but that was back when I was eighteen-years-old doing my A-Level Art....

A detail from In the Dark Woods, 2019, from my Acid Renaissance series. I recently read, and greatly enjoyed, Alan Moore’s latest novel I Hear a New World, the second instalment in Moore’s Long London series, following on from The Great When. I’m not here to review it, but I would highly recommend it and its...

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 gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader...

Over on my ‘about me’ page, many years ago, back in the teenage years of this millennium, I wrote: My artwork has sold to collectors across the world, mainly facilitated directly through online sales rather than through galleries or agents. And this has, until very recently, been true. Not so much nowadays, though....

Over the course of the umpteenth heatwave last month, and in the wake of over 2700 excess deaths estimated in England and Wales during the May and June heatwaves, I read When there are wolves again by E. J. Swift. The blurb from the author’s website: Activist Lucy’s earliest memories are of living with her...

The UK government is finally starting to put together advice for households to stock up on food supplies, which should be announced as part of a campaign soon (I’ll add a link here when the official advice is released). According to the environment secretary Angela Eagle earlier this week: We’re about to experience...

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 gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader...

Since I’ve got an exhibition of my life-drawings coming up in September I’ve been thinking about the importance of observational drawing, and life-drawing in particular, within my artistic practice. The act of drawing plays an important, if sometimes behind-the-scenes, role in nearly every artists’ practice,...

I’m having a new exhibition here in September this year, once again returning to 1200 Postcards on Queens Road in Hastings: Flesh & Bone An exhibition of life-drawings by Paul Watson. The new exhibition is entitled Flesh & Bone and will feature a selection of my life-drawings from the past few years. The venue is...

Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Last Friday my friends and I drove east to Dungeness, a headland on the Kent coast. It’s most well-known for two nuclear power stations (both non-operational now), Prospect Cottage (the home of the late film-maker and artist Derek Jarman), and looking like a completely alien...

Detail from the first life-drawing from today’s session I did my last life-drawing session of July earlier today, making a total of four sessions. I’ve got another life-drawing session booked for tomorrow afternoon. Thirty minute drawing with Sanguine pencil & Conté crayons I’ll probably not keep up with four...