Chris Sutcliff

You walk so slowly

Sans haste

And I walk so quickly

Before too long

I am at your back

Surely you can hear me

Chomping at your heels

Unable to get around you

Is it really so hard

To step to one side

And let me get passed

And away

What’s captured your attention so

To belligerently keep your eyes to the sky

And not on the floor

Where you would plainly see

How slowly you are walking

And how close my feet are behind yours

My frustrated foot-falls

Versus your absent shuffle

A match indeed

For a wounded snail

On valium

Thus, with growing irritation

I noisily hurry you along

With my tutting

And my heavy, stunted steps

Wondering all the while

How you came to be so slow

And I so fast

And how on earth

You got into my house

In the first place?

We begin with the set-up, the fix, the sting.

The cross-hairs fall on you and you won’t see it coming. It’ll happen in a crowd and it’ll be swift as the wind like it was for Kennedy, like Lennon, like MLK. Your enemy camouflaged in plain sight by your unseeing eyes. Bold as brass they’ll walk straight up to you in the high street. Right to your face. Big flashy smile oscillating into a joyfully intentional ‘Wow’ shape. “Haven’t seen you for ages” they’ll insinuate with the confident beaming swagger of a well fed dog. “Haven’t seen you ever” You’ll think. Who is this person? Not a clue. Yet they’ve so expertly inspired that thin uncertain smile you’ve adopted to mask the puzzlement your eyes betray. Their grin refuses to falter and it hits you then. This person genuinely knows who you are – Whereas you’ve completely erased THEM from your hand picked history. An embarrassingly transparent attempt to not appear rude suddenly the unsteady crutch of your brittle social automaton. Oh God. Worse still, they’re staying for a conversation. Maybe a few more seconds and it’ll…..no. No, it won’t. At a loss and preying for a re-boot of clarity, you’ll fail to mention your inability to recall name, face, anything. Mustn’t drop the charade. Mustn’t expose one’s fraudulent nature. Mustn’t look like an idiot. Just hang on to that vacuous expression of forced glee. Hide your weakness. Survive.

Finger on the trigger now.

Seizing the initiative they’ll bring up the match and they’ll know you’re a Red. They’ll ask about your Job. They’ll ask about your Dad. Things gets more awful every second. A visible discomfort has you in its clammy grasp. You’re nodding and laughing and exchanging knowing looks with a complete stranger and you go on and on and on like some sort of marionette. Like being polite and accommodating got somehow more important than honest integrity. The façade now the only solidity you have left. You don’t ask them about their team or their job or any people they know. You can’t. The conversation is so one sided you idly wonder when it will tip up and release you from this awkward misery. There is absolutely no way now you can admit to not knowing this person without looking like a self-centred twat that has nothing for old acquaintances but amnesia. Undone and uncovered you fake an appointment and you say your goodbyes. You’ll look them in the eye and wish them well and hope they hadn’t noticed that you never once addressed them by their name, all the while shaking their hand. They’re nobody. And you promise to call this nobody who you can never call and who seems not to have noticed your vacuity. You haven’t lied so much in so short a space of time since you were a child and it leaves a taste in your mouth like worn leather.

Which brings us to the kill.

You’re not ten feet away when your road to Damascus moment happens and you realise they were X. X who you were best mates with for all those years while working at Y. X who mended your bike. X whose sister you got with at the Christmas do. X who could squirt milk out of the corner of their eye. X who made you laugh most days. X who you’ve so easily forgotten. X who you no longer know. X who bares the brunt of deleted memory. Where did that go? All those good times crushed under the weight of your experience and you somehow never noticed. X disappears back into the crowd and back into a part of your life where you haven’t lived for a long, long time. Both of you victims of the same theft. One of many tiny deaths that took you softly as a mothers kiss. Your life like all lives tearing through memory and tearing through time like a bullet. The bullet you use to assassinate yourself. You won’t see it coming.

Acrylic

8 x 5.5 inches

2009

First and foremost, Congratulations to President Obama on winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. I happen to be a big fan and, despite what I am about to say, I truly believe he deserves it. I just don’t think he should have got it. Definitely not yet.

As a quick litmus test, the 205 nominations included Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, the man who dared to stand against the most ruthless dictator in the universe Darth Mugabe. Thousands of people died to vote him into power; hundreds of thousands were saved when he got there. Also featured was the Chinese Dissident Hu Jia, a man who has dedicated his life to peacefully bringing true democracy to China as well as tackling environmental issues and the AIDS/HIV problem. He is currently in prison and is suspected to be slowly dying through poor nutritional and health care that the authorities are providing for him (or not as the case definitely is). He is 36 years old.

The award does two major things for the winner, gives them $1.4m and gives them a huge media platform to rally continuing support for their cause – two major things that Barack Obama already has in abundance and will continue to perpetuate for himself. He just didn’t NEED to win. Unlike the other 204 and probably thousands more after them.

Much as I love the guy and am 100% behind him, Guantanamo is still open, more troops are on their way to Afghanistan and he’ll never bring in his fair health-care bill because he is still pandering to right wing extremists who have a firm control of his agenda. Making it THEIR agenda. Again. On top of all that Israel still seem to be behaving like an un-leashed pit-bull terrier. In short – nice media friendly start to the Presidency – but a helluva long way to go.

The pleasantly-nutty Norwegian committee stated the reason for their choice was “Extraordinary efforts to promote diplomacy and nuclear disarmament”. No arguments there, providing you momentarily put aside the fact that the USA has the biggest stockpile of nukes in the world. So do as they say, not as they do.

You can’t help feeling that this is a token gesture for a man who is probably GOING to do a lot of good work but so far is only talking about it. Let’s be honest here, after Bush, President Charles Manson would have looked like a Saint. Of course it LOOKS like he’s doing a great job, that’s because every media company in the world is still dry-humping his trouser leg. He’s everywhere. His face is on everything but the transfers in bubble-gum packets, which will probably appear in the shops tomorrow to commemorate the bloody award.

Finally, I think that it’s a bit fluffy to allegedly bestow such a prestigious honour based largely on things that we expect to happen in the future. It’s like your four year old kid winning Olympic gold for Javelin, based on one throw of a Crayon because it looks like one day he’ll grow up to be good at it. Let’s see it actually happen first shall we? Or is it a bit obvious that we couldn’t wait to be seen to be giving him the award, all that remained was to create a reason for it?

Has the Nobel Peace Prize been de-valued by this move? No, of course it hasn’t. But it has been misappropriated and that won’t go down well all over the world. I sincerely hope it won’t hamper the President in actually affecting all the brilliant and necessary changes that got him the nomination in the first place.

Good luck Mr. Obama. I really mean it.

Acrylic, Wood Adhesive, Various Printed Ephemera including Bible Pages on canvas

40 x 30 inches

2009

In town today there was a dead pigeon lying right in the middle of the precinct. More than merely dead – killed! Something had made a fair sized hole in its head and neck so it was lying in a pretty impressive pool of blood. I stood over it and surveyed the wreckage for a good minute or two. I’m not really sure what I was thinking, there was something absorbing about it, a morbid spectacle to polarise my otherwise routine day. I walked around the corner to buy an apple and when I re-crossed town I went back to it, willingly drawn in, fascinated. There was something gloriously unapologetic about it, lying there in the path of the masses, as though death had given it a hideous grace that life had been unable to dress it in. The living pigeons nearby, blissfully ignorant of their fallen comrade, continued bustling moronically in their repetitive and endless hunger. Each a testament to their own monotony and a vicious parody of ours. They eat. They shit. They eat. They shit. Repetitive. Routine. Tedium. In ceasing to be, the expired had transcended the mould of its existence and become so very much MORE.

I watched for as long as I could, while upwards of ten mid afternoon shoppers were momentarily shocked out of their passivity by the grizzly insertion of this little morality play into their field of vision. The look of horror on one woman’s face was mesmerising. She was visibly affronted by the bare fact of it’s lying in her stead, but could she take her eyes off it? No. She could not. And could I take my eyes off her? No. I could not. She craned her neck to keep it in her sight as she walked toward it, over it, away from it. We do that don’t we? Stare at the things that horrify us. Like the traffic slowing down to observe a car crash, hoping not to see something appalling and yet yearning to see it at the same time. The allure of the atrocity. The tonguing of the loose tooth.

In the end I realised what had satisfied me the most. It was the fantastically indelicate way it had deflowered the faux-sanitary pretence of our shopping centre with its choice of final resting spots. Burnley high street looks exactly the same as every UK high street with its stainless steel and glass walkways and same old stores and blah blah blah. Yet, despite their million pound logo’s and their designer window displays, the retail giants were today upstaged by the abrupt and splendid exit of a single verminous parasite. Their clinical, calculated stage fronts tarnished forever. Not just visibly, by the sort of stain that only sacrificial blood can leave, but also symbolically. For what are you to do when your beautifully packaged goods and your nice tidy shop are not even nearly as arresting as a dead pigeon lying right in the middle of the precinct.

Acrylic

8 x 5.5 inches

2009

Acrylic

16 x 11 inches

2009

Thanksgiving Prayer

By William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997)

“Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches.

For decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind their
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories– all right let’s see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.”

“The map is not the territory.”

Alfred Korzybski. 1879 – 1950.

Having a life-plan and setting personal goals is probably the most valuable piece of advice that I will ever give you but never actually follow myself. It’s good advice because it’s obviously good to have a plan to work to and to always know where you are regarding that plan and to stringently plot your way towards a fulfilled life. I personally find it impractical because I have never once observed ‘life’ give a shit about anyone’s plans for it and the most rewarding and memorable moments of MY life have been entirely un-planned. You could argue that it is unwise to take life lessons from a guy who’s broke and lives in his mate’s box-room, only I’d argue back that I haven’t felt this content and together for years. I have yet to see the strategically planned route to faultless contentment written down – If you have this then please share the wealth.

I’ve been working on a canvas for a few weeks now and it’s taking me through the usual twists and turns as it tries to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. Actually, that reminds me, at a wedding the other week a seven year old boy asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Brilliant. I told him I wanted to be an Astronaught! Then I watched a program where I found out how tricky it is to poo in a space suit and that prolonged weightlessness makes your bones lose density, so then I wanted to be an Artist again. Anyway, I’m staring at this canvas and wishing it would make its mind up when I realised that now would be a great time to fulfil one of my blog promises and take you behind the scenes of idea development. Try and contain your excitement…

Sometimes you do a painting where you already know the outcome, if not the approach, such as a portrait or a landscape. This has its dull moments. For most of my paintings I start with a general direction and then allow serendipity to pretty much do all the work. This is because I am too lazy to think and because random chance has better ideas than I do. The initial idea for this canvas came from the movie ‘Iron Man’. On a wall in Tony Stark’s Malibu beach house he has an abstract painting that is a bunch of tessellating rectangles painted a flat bluey-grey, like slates on a roof. I thought it was cool and would be simple to reproduce so I set about doing my own version of it. If you do something like this yourself, then a useful tip is to not keep looking at the original, work from memory alone, this is because you’ll remember it incorrectly and will therefore do your own take much more easily. Unless you are an Autistic Savant, in which case it will be an exact replica.

Because nothing is ever simple I decided to complicate my version on purpose. I learnt very quickly that there are more shades of bluey-grey than the world will ever have use for and the best ideas always come when you have passed the point that they should have been implemented. I’m a bit of a sucker for details so I started to include scraps of printed paper that I could paint over allowing random bits to show through to the surface. For this I used what I had to hand, some newspaper, the trusty old Bible pages and a colleague questionnaire that had been passed round work that same day. The questionnaire had a series of statements such as “I get a sense of accomplishment from the work that I do”, followed by a rating bar by which you declared if you:-

A) Strongly Agreed

B) Agreed

C) Disagreed or

D) Strongly Disagreed.

I often wonder if these odd mechanisms of enforced manager/colleague engagement are restricted to the arena of tedium that is office work or if all jobs have their version of them. I don’t suppose there is much call for such inanity if your job is to rescue beached whales or do heart transplants or test drive racing cars. I should count myself lucky though, what if you’re one of those poor people who have to single handedly manage the night shift at a 24 hour petrol station kiosk? Do they get a sense of accomplishment from the work that they do?

A) Agree

B) Disagree

C) I’m sorry, I’m so tired & lonely I can’t remember the question or

D) I’ve already killed myself.

What I particularly hate about these questionnaires is that they subversively restrict your answers and then force you to think about them as though you actually care. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to re-inspire the interest in a monotonous job that crushes the souls of all that contribute to it, you can’t turn a see-saw into a roller coaster. Let’s all at least be honest with each other and have a laugh with a bit more:-

E) I’m completely unaffected either way

F) Oh great, ten minutes away from my job reading this

G) I’m not here for accomplishment, I’m here to fund my college course / narcotic habit / gambling addiction / lack of social skills or

H) Whatever you want me to write so that you never bother me again.

Anyway, this painting. I’m seeing all this work stuff and bible stuff and I’m starting to make connections towards what this painting may be about. Many, if not all, Artists will disagree with me on this point, but I quite like paintings to be specifically about something and to have neat titles. This is because my route to painting was via illustration which nearly always alludes to a piece of writing and therefore often shares its title. I also want to put some text on it somewhere to tie it all in and so the text will probably become titular. So I come up with a corker – “My Job is not my Religion”. Alright, so it’s painfully obvious but it would have got people thinking and making comparisons and discussing various levels of personal importance and so on. Boom. Case closed. Next canvas.

It niggled at me though and I thought about its various meanings and messages until I exhausted them and I realised that the title would only be affective if you actually had a dull job. Like the questionnaire it was too restrictive. Also what if you were a Priest? So I re-titled it by being less specific – “My Job is not…”

Now it could be anything you want it to be. Like the questionnaire again but with the open dialogue the questionnaire SHOULD have had. Here are some things my job is not:-

…the only reason I get up in the morning.

…an interesting way of breaking the ice with strangers at parties.

…how I’d want my kids to remember me.

…anywhere on my list of priorities, it is merely the thing which allows certain parts of my list of priorities to be realised.

See! Look at all the fun you could have with THAT title! Not that it matters now, I had to scrap it again due to another very obvious point. The thing is I really want all my paintings to hang in people’s houses where they can be properly enjoyed. As clever as it may or may not have been, who on earth wants to have a painting that reminds you of your job? Surely the painting should be one of a million things in your home that help you forget about your toils and take you somewhere better instead. I wonder if Forest Rangers buy paintings of Offices?

As I write this the painting still has no title and no text, it no longer knows what it wants to say about itself. The colour scale has changed from bluey-grey to turquoise and is growing an ominous orange splodge which may or may not make it to the final cut. It has fragments of printed paper which may or may not have any meaning anymore and will probably be further obscured before this day is out, rendering them pointless. The only resemblance it now has to Tony Stark’s canvas is the layout, and as mine has more rectangles than his it doesn’t even resemble that. What I am left with is a fluxing beast with a will of its own that is becoming something that I could not have imagined, let alone planned for – And that’s exactly how I like it. It keeps me as interested doing the work as it hopefully keeps the viewer interested when seeing the end result.

To tie all this up I have to go back to my original point about goal setting. A very good friend of mine, who is an avid goal setter and who hopefully won’t take offence at this, made a point about goal setting that I’d like to challenge a teeny bit. He made the comparison between setting a goal to achieve an end result and having a map to a geographical destination. “You wouldn’t drive from London to Edinburgh without a map” he said. His point being that with a map you would hop on the right motorway and get to Edinburgh using the most direct route and in the shortest amount of time. My counter point is equally simple – Life is a journey and not a destination. Not having a map puts the adventure back into things. It also forces you to involve more people to help you with your journey and allows you to help theirs, like a team effort. Finally it puts you in a whole host of unexpected places and situations with which you can enrich your short time on this planet – a slow amble of discovery behind some cows on a dirt track in rural Devon is infinitely better than being stationary in a four mile tail-back south of Milton Keynes all in the name of pointing in the “right” direction.

Waiting to begin again. Frozen. Willing but unable. Wounded by memory. Fixed by the weight of it. Distant. Tiny fragments of a shattered wish. Eluded. A silence that becomes the only sound. A stillness that wavers in constant motion. A detachment that holds all things. Diminished. No turning point or grand re-awakening. Frail. Tattered and torn. Battered and worn. Frayed and forlorn. A ghost amid the crowd. Reticent. Nobody is listening. Spinning and separating and diluting and gone. Numb. Waiting to begin again…