Image: Me aged 18 at Maidstone College of Art in 1996

 

LOOK AT YOURSELF! 

‘PAINT! PAINT! No, you ain’t!’

said Mike Addison, my Graphics tutor

to me at Maidstone Art College in ‘96

‘PAINT! PAINT! No, you ain’t a graphic designer!

LOOK AT YOURSELF! You’re covered in paint!’

 

Hands in paint! Mate’s complaint

I can’t stop painting hands

The words ’BLOODY HANDS’

graffitied in black paint over my studio wall

I suspected it was black haired Kimberly White who I shared my studio with

Hands in paint! Kim’s complaint

‘LOOK AT YOURSELF!  Fists, wrists and toes in paint!

 

Years later, I discovered it was my still good friend Sarah Collins

 

PAINT! PAINT! What’s there to PAINT!?

Local barracks. Army lads

downing pints out on the pull

amongst private school boys

and Jane Austen olde-worlde

cottages

collide with feelings I had for classmate Adam

on cathedral lawn

Even my Painting tutor Alex Veness

at Winchester School of Art calls this city ‘the black hole’

Winchester, what’s there to paint!?

LOOK AT YOURSELF! You’re way to quaint!

 

PAINT! PAINT! Straight I ain’t!

Boarding flight to Berlin

for three-month study exchange, Summer ’99

An exchange of firsts

PAINT! PAINT!

First experience of live Performance Art

Hands cut drip blood becoming

PAINT! PAINT!

smeared over canvas

First time seeing men holding hands walking down the street

PAINT! PAINT!

immersed in electronic house beats

PAINT! PAINT!

Same sex bodies fizzing with energy

PAINT! PAINT!

First time in men-only bars and  gay cinemas

PAINT! PAINT!

Cottages

Voyeur of fist as a verb

PAINT! PAINT!

Berlin studio painting my lived experiences in writing, collage, film and photography

 

PAINT! PAINT! Straight I ain’t! LOOK AT YOURSELF! Fuck self-restraint!

 

From Berlin gay to cathedral saint

Back to black hole, say I ain’t!

Don’t let my Berlin energy taint!

LOOK AT YOURSELF! Get back to work! Get back to PAINT!

 

Millenium Madness

PAINT! PAINT!

New Year’s Eve ’99

The apocalypse is coming!

PAINT! PAINT!

Go to B&Q

Buy MDF board and gloss

PAINT! PAINT!

Work out of Dad’s garage that Summer

Reproduce signs and symbols I see

at the Co-op department store

I work at in Tunbridge Wells in

PAINT! PAINT!

I like how Gary Hume

PAINT! PAINT!

My hand being careful so paintings

have a finish as slick as his

Consumer advertising in

PAINT! PAINT!

But hand can’t control the

PAINT! PAINT!

Words bleed and melt into one another

oozing like cum over painted surface

PAINT! PAINT!

Satisfaction. Abstraction

Buy Now! Pay Later!

Buy Later! PAINT NOW!

 

PAINT! PAINT! Tell me they ain’t completely fucked!

Hang paintings up for art school crit

Visiting tutor from the Royal Academy remarks,

‘These new paintings capture the white noise

of postmodernist consumer society

Computer generated imagery painted by hand

like Andy Warhol in reverse

You’re like a queer Barbara Kruger, a gay Ed Ruscha

I nod and think, ‘Hell, yeah!’

Big fist up sneering Becky and David in my class

who claim to use only the most expensive paints in the trade

Bet they’re thinking,

‘PAINT! PAINT! How dare Lee paint!

LOOK AT YOURSELF! No painter should dare use B&Q paint!’

 

And I think, ‘Who cares!’

I’m a queer Kruger or Ruscha. That, I can acquaint!

 

‘PAINT! PAINT! Painter you ain’t’

said my tutor Jo Volley on first day of me starting

postgraduate Painting at the Slade

 

‘PAINT! PAINT! Painter, you ain’t

LOOK AT YOURSELF! You’re a performance artist!

Put away that paint!’

 

From collage angry fist installations

to my alter-ego at the Slade, Camp-Belle who liked her fist,

Jo was indeed correct

 

And now all these years later, here’s what I think ….

‘PAINT! PAINT! Who cares what I am or I ain’t. LOOK AT THIS POEM!

This poem’s at painting, its words are its paint.