Aurora (Original, Signed and Framed)

Original watercolour on heavy weight HP paper 

76cm x 56cm (unframed)

I've recently been looking at 'dumbphones'.  If you are not familiar with this term let me enlighten you - an aesthetic, premium dumbphone is a smartphone with all the distractions pared down to a predetermined set of essentials decided on by the manufacturer.  I am particularly taken with the lightphone 3 because it looks like a little brick and on the website there's this cool looking artist showing what he can do when he hasn't any distractions.

I imagine myself as this cool artist with his little brick phone, in a magnificent light filled studio, the light seemingly Mediterranean somehow, really focusing on the work at hand, without realising I'm caught in a rather nice fantasy. At a mere £600 I could embark on a life without scrolling, without email, without whatsapp groups (just imagine), without all the apps that sit redundantly on my iphone 14 pro max.

Hovering over the apple pay, I suddenly thought about Uber, Deliveroo and, well, the internet. These are extremely useful.  What a world we live in, where you can buy an expensive phone to stop you using your expensive phone, which you'll no doubt keep, because in the evenings you'll want to look at instagram. Why not just exercise some self discipline? Resist the addiction, direct some willpower. These devices may soon have a health warning like cigarettes. Imagine that reality! And the irony is, most adults know, just like cigarettes, too much phone is bad for us. 

Consider your daily screen time, if you check it - and lets sometimes leave our unholy comforters at home.  We do actually have a choice in the matter, one that doesn't require asking chatGPT how much screen time is healthy.

So what does this have to do with this painting . Not much.  I just have this forum in which to say what I want - but I will tell you what is cool.  The Northern Lights.  I have seen them only once, a natural light display in high-latitude skies caused by solar wind particles colliding with Earth's magnetic field.  It made me feel incredibly humbled, an atom like speck amongst unknowable, infinite vastness.

I think I'm susceptible to a dumbphone's philosophy because I want to be dumb, I want to go back to that lovely analogue world some of us will remember, in which a minidisc player and dvds were enough.  I paint because I find a kind of nostalgia in things that's sometimes hard to bear. 

All I'm after is a simple expression of the world, maybe even a dumb one.