Chris Sutcliff

Acrylic, Inks, Newsprint, Letraset Transfers

8 x 5.5 inches

2000

A running theme in many of my paintings is my insistence on picking titles in languages I am totally unfamiliar with and then getting my translations from dubious sources. Like celebrities and their celebrity tattoos. I seem to remember translating this one myself, letter by letter, using Greek typographic styles I found in an old dusty book. I showed it to a guy who was half Greek and he said I was nearly right. Like spelling POLITICIAN as T-O-S-S-E-R is nearly right.

Acrylic, Brown Envelopes Including Post Marks, Postage Stamp (Mailed), Printed Acetate (found)

8 x 5.5 inches

2000

That summer, me and a mate had gone to a river-side nature trail that had temporary sculptures scattered throughout by local artists. One of the sculptures had hundreds of strips of acetate hanging off it, each with the word ‘impermanence’ printed repeatedly down it’s length. A mile further down the river I looked down and found one in the water, clinging to a rock. I recognised the immense improbability of this discovery and took it as a sign that I should take the strip and use it. This picture was already half sketched out in my book at home, now it had a way to be finished and a title that was better than any I’d have thought of myself.

Acrylic, Ink, Masking Tape, Various Graph Papers, Tracing Paper, Printed Ephemera, Letraset Transfers

8 x 5.5 inches (Each Panel)

2000

The first double page spread from my self titled “Finish Me You Chicken Shit” sketchbook. The book remains unfinished.

It is hard to be generous during a recession, but the needy remain the neediest and even if you only have a little at least you have the opportunity to share.

I’ve been walking to work every day this year and on my way through town I walk past a ‘patch’ that always has one of two homeless guys in it. Same as they all do across the length and breadth of our great country these young lads sit cross legged and hunched over; framed between two shop fronts, with a cap on the floor in front of them and a thoroughly dejected look on their faces. Charity – without the middle men. It’s financially been a tough year for me and I’ve found myself giving these guys a steadily wider berth every time I have to walk past them. I walk on the other side of the street. I avoid their gaze. I pretend to be on my phone. Once I even imagined what I would say to them if I really just let rip about how angry it sometimes makes me to be guilt-tripped into giving them money, money that I’ve worked all day and painted all night for, barely to make enough to cover the bills. Because I entertain the idea that at some point they actually chose to quit life, stop working and let the rest of us take care of them out of pity. And as that imagined scene grew steadily uglier in my head and I felt how annoyed I’d become, I realised that something deeply uncomfortable had happened.

It wasn’t always like this for me. My Mum has a photograph of me from years ago on a sunny afternoon in Covent Garden, London. I have my arms around a tramp who is dressed exactly the same as every tramp Disney have ever portrayed on film. I had been talking to him for ages and we were laughing and dancing to the music that came from a nearby pub; then he thoughtfully shared his very warm, very open for a long time can of Special Brew with me. I remember swigging it just as I noticed he had about three teeth left in his head; they were the colour and texture of mahogany wood. I must have ingested a cocktail of germs that day that would have made Louis Pasteur erect. That’s about twenty Man-Points. I had such a good time that for years afterwards I gave all the money I could spare to every homeless person I met and would bother them incessantly with late night drunken conversations at every opportunity. It did nothing whatsoever for the problem of homelessness but I met some nice people and felt pretty good about myself. Incidentally, the war memorial outside Victoria Station in London is a daily meeting spot for many old homeless guys who are all ex-servicemen. When they get drunk and their stories come out they are well funny and worth an idle afternoon when you’ve missed your train.

In 2007 I met Tony. Tony was the homeless guy who’s ‘patch’ was the 24 hour kwik-e-mart that I lived above in Portsmouth. He was in his late forties, with wispy hair that may have been ginger when clean. Always boisterously drunk on cider no matter what time of day you encountered him. I had to re-introduce myself every time we spoke; he would know my face but be unable to recall how. He had my spare change, ate my spare pizza and had my painkillers when he fell and hurt his hand. He told me about his lost family about five times. All memory of this he erased in a drunken haze. Winter that year was particularly harsh and one night near Christmas my mate Tom James and I found Tony at three in the morning in a doorway across the road turning blue. He was drunk, disorientated, shivering violently and crying and scared. His trousers were thin and ripped and he was trying to wrap himself in filthy newspapers as he had no jacket. It was unbelievably cold. I ran home and got a pair of decently lined tracksuit bottoms and a quilt. Tom and I had to get him dressed and wrap him in the quilt otherwise I’m pretty sure he would not have lived to see the daybreak. Such is the thin line between good and bad fortune for lost souls like Tony. By morning he’d gone, leaving a quilt I didn’t want anymore in a doorway that had nearly been a grave. Last time I saw him he had a room at some sort of care centre and they had located his daughter so he was walking the three miles to visit her. It was about four in the afternoon. He looked pretty tipsy.

My work colleagues in Pompey spend two days each Christmas doing voluntary work in London at a homeless shelter and one year I went with them. We were part of a team of about fifty volunteers for the homeless charity ‘Crisis’. If you ever want reality to slap you good and hard around the face I highly recommend you do this one year. We fed people and clothed people and talked to people and then watched helplessly while most of those same people went immediately outside the shelter to buy crack off the dealer – The dealer that lived in the flat opposite and sold directly to all the broken people of no fixed abode. You can imagine the sort of chap HE was. Most of the people at the centre were forty years or older. Some were Poles who had immigrated here for a job that had failed to materialise. Some were just pensioners who did have a house but had no visitors for the holidays and couldn’t afford to heat their homes or buy food – so they came here. I couldn’t believe I was in the same country. On the last night someone brought a guitar and we all sang Christmas carols together, I felt like I was back at school but in a good way. As we warbled out ‘Silent Night’ one of the old boys started sobbing – he had contracted AIDS from sharing a needle and the doctors had said this would be his last Christmas. I haven’t thought about him since that year and now I am writing this and he is long since dead.

I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand what a change it was for me to feel angry with the guys on my way to work and deliberately and inventively go out of my way not to give them a penny. What had gone wrong there then? I was so worried about my own finances that I’d shut off from the less fortunate and was now angering myself at having the impulse to share any of my money for no benefit of my own. I had forgotten that people go through hell when they truly lose everything and that maybe I’m in no position to judge how they react. I know for a fact I’m not the only one who walks past these people in the street and in life and if that is our choice then fine. But we’re good people though right? We still want to do the right thing. Are we being tight and selfish or do we just not want to give money to people who will then spend it on drink or drugs and be worse off for our kindness? Perhaps if we get a better understanding of their plight, on a personal level, we’ll be more inclined to help, right? Right. I thought so too. We just need to re-connect. So on Saturday I went into town with five quid, a cold can of Fosters, a note book and a pen to interview the homeless guys.

I found them both together, sitting in the merciless sun watching their collection cap and keeping their dog occupied. I sat with them and introduced my self and asked if it was OK if I chatted to them a while. They asked if I was from ‘Tower’; I said I didn’t know what that was, at which they relaxed and agreed to speak to me. I explained what I was trying to achieve and why I had decided to do it and where the resulting story would appear – they were fine with all of it and I have to say immediately very friendly. The beer bribe had worked a treat. The guy I really spoke with the most is called Paul, his dog is called Zeb and his mate is called Ryan. The following is a write up of our conversation rather than a written interview as I tried to keep it as chatty and non-intrusive as possible and because I can’t hold a linear conversation to save my life. Also whenever I go back to old notes and try and read them they are always baffling or illegible, as if I picked up someone else’s by mistake.

Paul is 32 years old and a Burnley boy, he has been officially homeless for the last ten years. He has the swollen hands of a man that has known cold. His downward spiral began one January when he walked into the family house to find his Dad lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. His Mum and Dad were both heavy drinkers and his Dad had suffered a massive and fatal brain haemorrhage. This had enough of an effect to boot Paul clean off the tracks and he soon found himself mixing with entirely the wrong people and self medicating with Heroin. Within a few short months his ‘mate’ had duped him into assisting with a burglary for which he was caught and sentenced to nine months at her Majesty’s pleasure – released in four and a half. That October, not three months out of  Prison he returned home one day to find his Mum dead as well. She had been drinking more heavily than ever since her husbands death and son’s incarceration – the result was sclerosis of the liver and death by septicaemia. That’s both parents in the same year, on Sundays that both happened to be the 24^th day of their respective months. Get your mind round that one. Paul quickly became homeless and took to begging in order to avoid a life of burglary and theft and to get enough drugs to not think about what had happened. He was able to eventually get off Heroin by seeking help and undergoing a program of methadone reduction. He eventually got off methadone but increased his intake of alcohol – resulting in the strange kind of alcoholism that is measured by severely restricted funds. I learned immediately that giving beer to homeless people is as stupid as you can get. He had done his fair share of sleeping rough but eventually got himself a care-of address with a friend – probably not the burglar friend.

I asked him how much money he usually makes in a day and the answer was about £6. I found this a bit of a shock (I’d expected way more for some reason), as from that £6 he has to get enough food for him and Zeb, presumably pay something towards his lodgings and get a couple of cans of beer so he can get to sleep at night. I asked him what his best takings on a single day had been and he said £15. I asked him what his worst day was and he said seventy pence. I guess that was diet day. Sometimes people bring him a pasty or a sandwich which helps his money go further.

I asked him what he was doing to get out of his situation and this was when things started to fall into place. Paul has been trying to get psychiatric help so he can deal with the death of his parents and re-build his life. He has seen three doctors in ten years that have not been successful and now he has to apply in writing to someplace in Preston that will refer him back to a fourth specialist in Burnley. Depending on whether this specialist is more adept than the last three and – taken only from Paul’s side of the story – can be a bit more bothered to help him, could mean the difference between his getting back on his feet or forever sitting behind a cap between two shops. I wonder when he’s going to write that letter.

Ryan has seen much more death than Paul and once again it was failure to get the right help at the right time that had landed Ryan on the streets, also in the grip of Heroin. That drug sure digs the meek. Amongst many other tragedies, Ryan’s girlfriend had lost five babies during pregnancy, when the sixth was born it lived just a few months. I got the impression they weren’t together anymore. He was optimistic though because he was on methadone now and feeling better (he showed me the bottle of it that he had just picked up from the Pharmacy – he referred to it as ‘Kryptonite’), and he had friends in Scotland that had arranged for him to go and live with them. Better indeed. Apparently, getting out of Burnley was paramount to his well-being. I know about 30,000 people that would agree with him.

Ryan also explained how easy it was to get Heroin anywhere in the UK. I was told that if you just stand outside the nearest public telephone box to the local Post Office on Giro day, first thing in the morning, there will be a queue of Junkies all calling their dealers to get a fix. All you have to do is give them your money and jump in on their purchase. Why, that’s almost too easy isn’t it. Begging and Heroin are both illegal but on the subject of crime Paul and Ryan were fiercely opposed to any criminal activity that made someone else a victim, particularly burglary. They said that when you were ‘on the rattle’ you had enough time to think about what you had done to people (theft) and it made you feel terrible. I never asked what ‘on the rattle’ meant but it was said in the context of either being in prison or suffering the painful withdrawal of Heroin by means of cold turkey, so it refers to one of those. We were all done so I thanked them both for their time and set off home with that weird feeling that happens when you get what you asked for but not what you wanted.

What I got from all this is that Paul and Ryan became and remain homeless because they suffered depression as a result of a family tragedy and before their issues of grief, guilt or remorse could be dealt with by the right people it all turned into self-destruction. Heroin was the easy out. Heroin is a cheap way of totally annihilating yourself and it comes with the added bonuses of – A) taking years to destroy you so you can really load up on self loathing before you wither and die and B) being totally socially unacceptable so that people go out of their way to not help you and also blame you to really rub it in. Perfect. When you finally kick Heroin you find you have sold all your valuables and no longer have an address so getting a job or any sort of benefits is enormously difficult. You also have few friends left and those you do have are usually the guys you did Heroin with so once again your support network is paper thin. How does one get out of the trough? Well, you steal or you beg or you do both and you drink if there’s no drugs because every time you try to go to sleep sober you see your dead parents. I know very little about mental illness but I would guess that Paul and Ryan have had a savage dose of it – which means that the only difference between me and them is that if I had problems I would probably get to a Doctor in time and be properly supported afterwards. If you’re not that lucky then the rest is just a slippery slope that is dictated by your peers and your own dwindling resilience.

You were right at least. When you thought to yourself “I’m not going to give this person any money because they’ll just spend it on drink or drugs” you were right. When you thought to yourself “there must be a more intelligent answer to this rather than endlessly giving this guy my spare change so he can drink it and we can just start all over tomorrow” you were right again. But you don’t want to be the person that turns a blind eye all the time and neither do I. Pretending to be on your mobile phone to avoid the homeless is the mark of an ass-hole. I did all this so I could re-evaluate and do the right thing and not be an ass-hole anymore. So next time I’m faced with it I’m going to at least say hello to the homeless because I want them to feel acknowledged if nothing else; and I can do that without breaking my stride. When I have a bit more time I’ll stop and have a chat with them because it’s nice when somebody wants to hear about your life and it’s nice to feel like you’re participating in the world. Maybe every time you tell your story you see a teeny bit more of the wisdom of it too. If I actually want to donate it seems like the best thing to do would be to buy a bit of food instead of handing over cash, a tin of dog food probably wouldn’t go a miss either. It’s not going to solve anyone’s problems but I can manage it and maybe contribute towards the growing hope of a less fortunate human being.

If you are interested in doing more, take a sneaky peak at www.crisis.org.uk, and see if you dare spend Christmas with people more interesting than your Aunt Mabel.

Is it still a beginning when it’s the thousandth time you’ve begun?

There is a half written business plan on my laptop, which is waiting very patiently to become an ACTUALLY written business plan and to do more than just sit on my laptop. It is a rare thing for me to wander into the realm of the professional and grown-up, but here I am with my toe in the water and the temperature is very agreeable indeed. In an earlier blog, before my blogs had a website to appear on, I wrote a statement of intent that I would document the various stages I went through as I try to make a living as an artist and not just the guy in the office who does the least work. Three of these stages have happened within the last few weeks so I thought I’d better be true to my word and record them here, to give you a break from my usual endless pontificating about life, the universe and everything. I figure there’ll be time enough to bore you all with that later.

One of the reasons I merrily skip back to an office job everyday is not just because of the fulfilling work and excellent pay (!) but because I have flexibility over the amount of hours I put in. To be fair to the company, they have really been very understanding towards my needs. I told them upfront what my plans were and, in between pointing at me, whispering and sniggering, they have let me do what I asked and reduced my working week by the equivalent of a day – thereby giving me an allotted amount of painting hours and a financial target to hit to make up the shortfall in my wage. So lesson number one in pursuing your own venture is to make sure you are properly supported and to work for a company that doesn’t sack you the minute you express any interest in a life outside of that company. There are precious few in my experience, unless you can put together an awesome hamburger.

The next stage was the actual launch of this site. I needed a route to market and a permanent exhibition space and this site has given me both. I still don’t fully understand it and I nearly break it every time I load up an image. When I visit friends I wait for them to leave the room and then hurriedly get the website up on their computer to make sure it’s still there, as though it may slip down the back of the great internet settee if I’m not careful with it. Then I annoy everyone by talking about it all the time. Thinking about it, maybe don’t get a website, they turn you into an idiot.

As I mentioned earlier, stage number three is to have a business plan. It will help you understand that you have been selling your paintings for chump change for years and that you should’ve been a trillionaire by now. This will make you cry for a while but just keep reminding yourself that you’re Mummy’s special soldier and you’ll be alright. If your business plan is particularly good, it will tell you that it should have been written BEFORE you had a website and reduced the hours off your only source of income. Smart arse.

The last canvas I completed (‘One day something amazing will happen’) represents for me the end of a particular way of working and the start of a new one. I have been very fortunate in that I have been commissioned to do paintings or illustrations more or less constantly since I left University but I have nearly always had the content dictated to me by the buyer. I have had colour schemes picked for me because they match the curtains. I have had shapes recommended because they match the furniture. I have also been asked to do things that were absolutely beyond me, particularly portraits. Many years ago a lady commissioned me to paint a group of her friends enjoying a meal from a small photograph – a photograph that had managed to capture a great deal of nostalgia but almost no discernable detail. I copied it as best I could and made the image a bit larger but some of the faces had been turned into featureless masses by the camera and, as I had never met these people, I had to invent what wasn’t there. The lady was disappointed with the result and I was disappointed with the twenty five quid payment – so we were even. I haven’t painted portraits since.

Having the site and the time and a plan now means it is time for me to be true to the sort of images I really want to produce and to pursue the themes I am interested in. So when I say this is a new way of working I do not mean that from now on I will be snorting paint into my nostrils and sneezing on canvasses (seriously though, how cool would that be!) but worrying less about how ‘acceptable’ my paintings are. People can decide for themselves if they get it or not and if it’s worth parting with their hard earned cash and burning the curtains to have it on their living room walls. All I need now are some ideas. I check the mail everyday to see if they’ve arrived. Until they turn up I’ve been staring at the canvas that I painted flat turquoise three days ago and I’m still not sure what comes next. Actually, it’s brilliant. Not the turquoise, I meant that the feeling of uncertain and boundless freedom is brilliant. It’s brilliant because I am starting again for the thousandth time and yet it still feels like the one and only beginning – and beginnings are the best of things to be a part of.

Acrylic, Newsprint, Spray Paint on canvas

24 x 36 inches

2009

Done as a homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jasper Johns. Referencing the work of your heroes always feels uncomfortably close to stealing from them. Although, if you become exceedingly good at it then you will have a lucrative career in forgery and will no longer care what they think.

I have been alive for 11688 days. Can I have a beard now please?

“While I thought that I was learning to live, I have been learning how to die.”

Leonardo Da Vinci.

In every division of your cells, in the comfort of your bed or down the barrel of a gun, in every room in every town, at the top of a mountain or the bottom of the sea, your death is waiting for you with a purpose and a patience that is beyond your comprehension. There is no escape – and in that one fact is either the greatest of freedoms or the cruellest of prisons. I remember very clearly when we first met. At roughly the age of eight, during a long, insomnia ridden night whilst on holiday with my family, I comprehended for the first time that death was forever – anti life – a black nothingness that would separate you from the world until the end of time. I felt what it was like to be immobile and lost in the unfathomable dark but still conscious and aware, more terrible in my imagination than the real thing could ever be. I woke my Dad with my crying and when he asked me what was wrong I blurted out that I was going to die. He asked me if I meant right now and I said no, but one day I would. He told me to stop being silly and to get back to sleep, he said ‘everybody dies’ and then he went back into his room. It was four o clock in the morning.

‘Everybody dies’. Kind of a strange way of dealing with a petrified child don’t you think? Confirming their fears as absolute truth and then merrily leaving them to think about the horror for a bit longer. ‘Yes Christopher, there IS a monster under your bed and it will probably rip you limb from limb before your screams wake the rest of us up, Goodnight!’ Perhaps death is the only subject that should not, or cannot be diluted for anyone. I read somewhere recently that, as man is the only animal that understands that one day he will die, that knowledge can move him to some of the greatest acts of heroism or human dignity as well as reduce him to the lowest acts of cowardice. I read this and I realised that I have not yet confronted death. I’m not really sure how to. I am worried that this will leave me susceptible to cowardice and this is not how I wish to be, certainly not how I wish to think of myself. Here’s an interesting question – if you knew the time, place and cause of your death, would you live your life differently to how you are living it now?

Death has been with me recently for two very different reasons. My Grandma had a stroke a couple of months ago and has since been doing a sort of hospital tour of the North West. Up until the stroke she was a very independent person so this whole experience has been frustrating and undignified for her – as it must be for the thousands across the UK who go through the same thing. My family and I went to see her last weekend at a nursing home where she was awaiting the final all clear to be allowed to go back to her own home and look after her self once more. Nursing homes trouble me; I know all the good they do but still I cannot shake the thought that they are a convenient place for us to put our dying relatives because our western culture keeps us all working so hard that we cannot take on the extra burden of looking after our own parents at home before they leave us forever; they are how we hide from the truth of death. The place was (of course) really nice and as you’d expect amongst the host of people just sat staring into space there were some real characters there. One lady who was particularly sprightly informed me she was 97 years old and kept doing a little dance for my bemused 4 year old niece. My Grandma appeared to be tolerating her with an annoyance that was too tired to manifest properly. Another old bloke was shuffling up and down and messing with his false teeth, extending them way out of his mouth and then retracting them back in again, it was all oddly childlike. My Grandma looked weary and bored and very resigned to what was going on. The next day, my Dad would accompany her and some sort of health representative to her house so that she could prove her independence by getting in and out of bed and using the bathroom. My Dad explained this to her and she looked at him in exactly the same way as a child looks at you when you are explaining how they have to behave at an adult’s party or something. She is 92, widowed twice (three times if you count her ‘friend’ of ten years, Fred), has got over a broken hip, bowel cancer and repeated angina attacks and now beyond anything else in the world absolutely cannot wait to die. She is a prime voluntary candidate for euthanasia. We are all rallying around her trying to prolong her life in the same way that you squeeze more and more toothpaste out of an empty tube and yet, to her, death is a sweet release that cannot come quickly enough, an elusive friend with an open invite to pop in for tea. Why are WE so afraid of HER death when it is the one thing she prays for? As of yesterday, she passed her ‘entrance exam’ and is back home at last. Providing she can stay there long enough to die peacefully and with dignity in her own bed then she will have won the fight. She is the only person who I have ever met that has taken the fear and the sadness from death and turned it into a blessing. I have absolutely no idea how I will feel when she goes. How do you mourn somebody who lived a full life and then got what they wanted? The answer is you don’t. When you grieve, you grieve for yourself.

Next week I will be 32 years old. I’m not panicking about that but here is an interesting thought – at some point in my thirties, I am likely to hit my halfway point. That’s if I’m lucky enough to live to a reasonably old age. I am always a bit surprised at myself as to how quickly my mind jumps to my own mortality. When I catch a cold I’m dying, I get a bit of a headache it’s the beginning of an aneurysm, and trapped wind is acute liver failure. I had a sharp stabbing pain in my kidney’s the other week and in mounting panic I ripped my shirt off to check the area and discovered that it was the corner of the washing instructions label in my shirt that had been poking me a bit. What I appear to be petrified of is that my death will be the opposite of my Grandma’s – a screaming, exploding violent death that leaves the bitter regret of unfinished work in its wake. I was at a party with my mate Mark the other day and the fact that the patronage was younger than us was enough to have him thinking of his own mortality and to launch us both into a long drunken conversation about our grand exit. So, it’s not just me, we’re all at it. I have shaved my hair down to the scalp for the last ten years but at the moment I am growing my hair for a bet, so whereas most people find their grey hairs one at a time I have suddenly been presented with a fair selection of them all at once. The weight of time is altering me. I also realised the other day that my face is changing again, the same as it did in my early twenties, early teens and early childhood. As morbid as all this sounds it has created a certain amount of deep appreciation within me for what has gone before and also a certain amount of urgency for what I feel I have left to do. So is this death? A slowly creeping change that has been with us since birth and stays with us always so that, when hopefully we are old and our work is done, we embrace it with all our heart and follow it wherever it leads? That doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, that sounds like a perfectly acceptable curtain call.

So, if you knew the time, place and cause of your death, would you live your life differently to how you are living it now? I wouldn’t. It isn’t death that makes my life acceptable. It’s the other way around.

Happy local council polling day everybody!

Sinister the puppets

as they creep across the land,

sinister the purpose

as they smile and shake your hand,

sinister the secrecy,

sinister the lies,

sinister the race

and sinister it’s prize,

sinister all they represent

despite their claims it’s You,

sinister their interest

in what the voters do.

Don’t believe the media

and don’t believe the spin,

sinister the use of words

designed to pull you in.

Sinister the funding,

the hotel and private beach,

what fate awaits the hospital

the money didn’t reach?

Sinister the power game

giving industry the itch,

they’re holding us to ransom

unless, of course, you’re rich.

Yes, sinister the puppets

standing in a row

and sinister the puppeteer

controlling the whole show.

I wrote that poem during the local elections back in 2003. I was saving it for the next General Election but a certain someone seems rather hesitant to have one of those right now so here it is today instead. Back in 2003 we were all a bit worried / flabbergasted about the direction New Labour was headed in and were equally perturbed that the weak left would fall to the hard right and the BNP was going to be ushered in as a result. This they did, much to the apparent embarrasment of the voters involved, who promptly voted them back out again the year after. Six years on and nothing much has changed, apart from the size of the Labour party. I’m no expert but I reckon you’ll have a tough time running a country if your Party has less than two people left in it. Interestingly, if you swap the word ‘sinister’ for the word ’embarrasing’, the poem reads exactly the same. So as you toddle down to the polling station today, remember above all else to smile and to try and have fun as you attempt to shape an England in which number 10 Downing Street suffers less evictions in a week than the Big Brother house manages to all Summer.

On a more serious note, today is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which an estimated 2000+ people were killed by the Chinese authorities as they cleared the square of protesting students. Give thanks that we live in a democracy that allows us to take the piss out of it without fear of being run over by a tank. Not everybody has it this good.

Acrylic, spray paint on canvas

20 x 39 inches

2009

This was done for Rob as payment for making this site. Thank you for pointing out that this was a very cheap thing for me to have done to a friend. Sancho the Fat refers to Rob’s website name (and possibly also his secret alter ego) and I thought I was being dead clever writing it in Spanish. As I used Babel Fish for the translation, this is almost certainly not how any Spaniard would write this.