So there you are, sitting in someone else’s home in that post-meal enjoyment, the conversation is flowing, friends, family and even a date, when you realise you have a bit of food stuck between your teeth. Not wanting to get up and leave the conversation, you start with the tooth sucking, and when that doesn’t work, you team it with the tongue rolling and flicking action.
Still not having dislodged what your tongue has now decided to tell your brain is a whole chicken leg, conversation is now like being inside a wind tunnel, and with all the subtlety of a fat man in a tutu, you start to plough your fingers into your mouth, hoping a nail will finally do the trick.
It’s only once you look up and realise people are staring, your face contorted, fingers pulled inside your mouth like a demented clown, with drool running down your hand, that you excuse yourself and head for the bathroom.
Scrambling around for the dental floss, and with the dawning realisation that there may not be any dental floss, you spot a book in the corner, so you tear a strip off a page hoping to use it as a blade between your teeth, but all it does is fall soggily apart inside your mouth, after exhausting several strips, you now start to roll them up into spear-like structures, but they too collapse on impact.
Having now destroyed the ending of the book, your eyes now dart around the bathroom for a makeshift weapon against gum disease and madness; cellophane wrapping, cardboard, anything that can be stuck into your mouth to get rid of what now feels like the chicken leg, wing and beak.
Realising you didn’t even have chicken tonight, you decide, whilst in the bathroom, to have a pee, relax and take stock of the situation. Then, mid flow, you see it, like a glass of water in the desert, a thread, a loose thread hanging off a towel, and without thinking you reach out for it.
In hindsight maybe I should have locked the bathroom door.
After the crash, there I was, semi naked and semi dazed, trousers around my ankles, covered in piss, sprawled out on the cold tiled floor (which incidentally, was not doing me any favours in the sexual organ department), a towel around my head, and a bathroom littered with the torn pages of a book that no one was ever going to know the ending of.
And as I stared upwards past everyone’s faces, I noticed a tiny patch of ceiling that hadn’t been painted in, and I thought to myself …..’now, that’s fucking annoying’.
Do you know what else is annoying?
An artist apologising.
Should I apologise for painting a naked man? Or my work on 9/11?
Should I apologise for my career, my colours, my context?
Should I have apologised to a former art dealer, who then turned to religion and suddenly chastised me for my ‘immoral’ nudes.
The answer is no.
People will criticize, people will not understand and people will reject, but that’s just people.
To apologise as an artist is to say sorry for what I see, sorry for what I feel, sorry for what I do and sorry for being me.
As artists we must never apologise for being ourselves and for the work we do.
So here I am, and there you are, warts and all.
Just perfect.
