I watched Loving Vincent and The Square and parts of Final Portrait in the evenings over the past week. The first was magnificent, the second two were flawed but had their moments, their value.

The first set of doctoral paintings are complete. The PhD project(s) will now appear to appear in more explicit parallel. You'll see what I mean.

In the "art world" + dimensional news feed (CONTEXT) the Guggenheim offered to loan the President a gold toilet, instead of the van Gogh he requested. WHAT A TROLL-Y OOMPH GESTURE! O those curators!! Meanwhile Trump is off to Davos, where the recent tax plan for the USA will no doubt be popular. So far in the coverage of WEF I have heard not one word about the Paradise/Panama Papers. And so on. None of that is funny, really. The strain of forgetting is now a wave swamping the mooring of the concrete fictions that compose the mundane. Before one lost recollection dissolves, another absent memory supplants it in the void of shared memory. The social is not reinventing itself in this convolution of absence with the fluttering subversion of substance. The proper metaphor might be two greys, one light, one dark, poured into a slop sink with a sucking drain, and the fluid murk disappears with a snort after a momentary swirl and spiral down the hole.

But those are old stories, now. The new story is the Stock Market Correction. Or the pending US Government shut-down. Or... I can just watch JezZ Bold's fantastic video! Remember him performing this song a few months ago in front of "Network" in AFH Studio BK?

It's a difficult time to be a strictly technical, theoretical painter. Focal discipline is no joke in the studio. Being serious about art currently - in moments, on some days - seems mad, or just preposterous. Then the rain and debris seep through the skylight and spoil 100 pieces, and what can one do?

Conjecture and speculation and rhetoric are only sufficient to a point, and the poignancy of that fiction is not a moving image. Clever words, critique, do even less. One may as well wager on the weather with oneself for a share in nothing real. & That's the Truth, as Edith Ann said.