jflaxman

It’s been months since my last post and I have a lot to share. I’ll start by thanking the kind soul who gave me core membership last week. If it’s a response to recent work it’s very much appreciated. If it’s a response to older work I’ll have to apologise. The last ten years have seen much change and my creative work reflects this. I was at my most productive when I was single, mostly nocturnal, and estranged from friends and family. I lived like this for many years, and highly recommend it to incurable creatives who aspire to die alone. I couldn’t quite commit to this, and in 2015 committed myself to a very different life with a very different love. I don’t draw as often as I used to, but I've done a lot of things this year including running market stalls. I won’t call my recent output ‘art’ but it has had its benefits. My woodworking tools take up more space than a computer, tablet and scanner; but they cost less, quickly paid for themselves, and are easily turned to more

It’s been a very busy year, so I’ll start with an apology for my modest recent output and long-overdue replies. No-one deserves it more than the watcher who gave me core membership, which I’m yet to properly repay, but was very much appreciated! I haven't done so much creative work because a family member’s health concerns took me back to Sydney for a while. The flight there was memorable; after several months of near-drought, dark clouds hung over Tasmania’s parched farms and tracts of wilderness. The skies were clearer over Sydney, giving expansive views of a city I’ve seen from the air countless times. As a child in a much smaller plane, I found the Western Suburbs’ patchwork of red-tiled roofs and blue swimming pools striking; the familiar tapestry’s still there, but a lot of larger houses with dark grey roofs, smaller yards and no pools now dominate some areas. The scale of change was more apparent on the train ride from the airport. Tall apartments flank the western line, at

The last couple of months have been eventful. We've seen a regime change in Syria, intriguing footage of new aircraft in China, and noises from the USA that have some people wondering if reality is broken. It's probably more accurate to view these as the results of forces that have been at work for some time. They weren't ignored by everyone. Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars, which I read fifteen years ago, explores future scenarios of increasing severity; two of the mildest involve a heavily fortified US-Mexican border and a new Cold War in which northern powers compete for Arctic trade routes and resources. Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, which I read around the same time, describes the challenges societies built on cheap, abundant energy will face as traditionally cheap and abundant energy sources become less abundant and more expensive to extract. Whatever you think of their arguments, time has certainly lent weight to some, and although predictions should be read with a healthy