I wept when I witnessed the video of US Airman Aaron Bushnell setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in America in protest at the Gaza War, and later passing away from his injuries. It cannot not be spoken of…What cuts through my own emotions is a real need to plead to everyone hurting out there - please reach out and connect with others - and young people of conscience, please don’t leave us. We need you more than ever.

It seems to be that during times of great planetary change, if you’ve lived a while and done a lot, you find yourself looking back and taking stock to try to better understand the present. Artists,..we tend to keep a lot of diaries and notes too. Here are some visual and audio diary entries from between 2009 and 2010 right in the middle of painting my series The Assassination of Judy Garland, which was a processing of the 2008-09 Gaza War, the election of Barack Obama, the start of drone use in wars, and of course the so-called ‘war on terror’ years.

I’m posting two drypoint prints I printed as part of a print-mentoring session with WA fellow Artist Monika Lukowska last week. It’s titled Conversations with Orc III, but in my mind I’m already calling it The Spirit of AUKUS,… when I entered into this imaginary conversation about the AUKUS agreement and the Indo-Pacific, Orc started to ‘act-out’ the battles of his past…