Many art forms are embedded within some of the most profitable careers in western culture. Wall paintings are just one of countless forms of visual art.

Designers are artists. Designers create the form and aesthetic appearance of our entire industrialised culture. Your home, your transport, the furniture, the clothing your ware the equipment you use everyday. From tooth brushes to the city skyline. Everything.

Human civilization is a symphony of countless works of art, most of which are taken for granted by people who drift through life wanting 'stuff', uninterested in understanding what they already have. The more you understand about the history of culture the more you realise how rich our 'ordinary' lives are.

Choose any object on your desk at random, and there is a huge amount of embedded knowledge and history behind its existence. Often the story behind everyday objects is thousands of years old involving hundreds of creative people. Just google any object and you very quickly there is nothing 'ordinary' about ordinary things.

Only boring people get bored.

I suffered 13 years of bullying at school.

Nothing is 'going on'. There is no grand conspiracy surrounding you. Teenagers are not disciplined enough to pull something like that off. Very few people are at any age.

Almost everyone you will ever meet, will spend most of their time thinking about themselves, not you.

Most people make what they say up as they go. What you have encountered is a few coincidences and spontaneous acts of peer group pressure, nothing more.

The most important thing to remember is THEY WILL FORGET ABOUT YOU, THE MOMENT YOU ARE OUT OF SITE. They will move on to another target if the opportunity arises, or not. It only random fun to them. If you meet them 10 years from now they will probably not remember why they treated you badly. It was NOT important to them, it was just a moment of childish superficial stupidity. They have NO INTENTION of causing you lasting harm. They don't know you well enough.

The pain you are feeling now is your OWN. It was caused by them, but its energy source is you. Only you can deal with it.

Try to remember it was not important to them, so it should not be important to you.

In response to: [link]

Craft techniques are not important enough to hoard. Nor are ideas. Both are precursor elements in the making of works of art... little more than raw materials.

The most important aspect of your work is the living act of making, which is unique to yourself and everyone else. The physical combination of experience and imagination, transforms the nature of all ingredients, into an event beyond the sum of its parts.

If you have the time to worry about your 'tricks' then you are not concentrating on what is truly important: supercharging your visual literacy. In other words striving to be as innovative, adaptive and versatile as possible.

Do whatever it takes to make yourself a better artist. Freely exchanging your knowledge and ideas is the best way to do this along side practicing your chosen art form.

Artists are dead for most of their lives.

Long live Hakubaikou. [link]

May her vision inspire future artists, along the path of excellence.

Long will her vision shine. Long after we today have all followed her, away from this tiny planet.

I mostly eat vegetarian meals these days, but I am not strict about it.

I love to admire women’s clothing. I love to ware leather aprons and functional work clothes with tools hanging off my belt. I love to be ready to create anything anywhere anytime.

I was brought up in a very artistic family. Our house was a private gallery. Our living room was our father’s studio. I have lived all my life with walls covered with original works of art and the air filled with the sound of musicians practicing.

I have three very small but noticeable moles growing on my face, which I do not like.

Although my childhood and home was wonderful, my primary and secondary education was a living hell of bullying and abuse. I hated every minute of it, and the psychological damage done to me was incalculable.

I have no time for a ‘god’ as it is generally understood. The idea that a god can be packaged into a name, or thought of in terms of an individual identity makes no sense to me. As soon as you think of a god in terms of ‘god’ you have losed the plot as far as I am concerned. A simple name and identity implies understanding and as humans we cannot begin to conceive of an entity beyond time and space.

I do believe the universe is big enough for metaphysical belief and I am comfortable with idea that human perception has profound limitations. I do not believe in an absolute truth because of the limitations of human perception.

I am a person of profound faith. But my faith by definition cannot be defined in absolute terms. If I were pressed I’d say my faith lies in the power of human creativity and the self-organising life force that exists throughout the entire universe.

I suffer from clinical depression; it is called chronic or major depression. This means everything I have ever experienced in my life is at a lower level of ‘happiness’. My ‘normal’ state of being is depressed from your point of view. My ups and downs are also scud towards depression. My lows are dangerous, my highs are very mild. I never experience excitement inside, though I may appear to be jumping for joy on the outside. It is not fun to be me.

I am an intellectual, which simply means I love to think about things a lot. There is nothing ‘special’ about this, any more than some people like to play sport a lot. But it does mean that I do go places in my thoughts that most people would never dare to go.

I do not hate anything or anyone if I can help it. I understand the meaning of hatred too well to use the term lightly. I cannot afford to hate anything because it will aggravate my depression.