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.
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
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All posts (71)
This is my contribution to December’s IndieWeb Carnival hosted by V.H. Belvadi on the subject where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030, just five short years from now? And my answer is that it’ll probably be pretty much the same as it is now. Back in the late 1990s when a huge number of personal websites (like this...
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...
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 upstart forces of far-right authoritarianism, led by the rich and powerful, for 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 and the post-apocalyptic pastoral—I mentioned that culture and the arts are the...
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...
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 Collective joy & collective ownership of ritual so I won’t describe it again, but...
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 amongst the torrent of a typical timeline. Subscribe via RSS (and other) feeds...
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 that would allow people to follow the blog through sites/apps such as Mastodon....
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 improve society every five years. Didn’t succeed this time? You’ll have to wait...
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...
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 first time in as long as I can remember. Reading the interminably terrible news...
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 be) an increasing wallowing in nostalgia, and how I didn’t much like it: And...
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