My visual essay comes out when The Blake Society’s launches issue 4 of its journal VALA in London on November 29th, 2023 (Blake’s birthday is the 28th). With encouragement from VALA’s Editor, I decided five months ago to finally create a shop on my website to sell my art (& especially my VALA prints) direct from my studio.

On this tragic, painful week for both innocent Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks and innocent Palestinian civilian families suffering in Israel’s bombings and water, electricity, medicine and food siege of Gaza, I am reposting some paintings I did around 2009/10 after the Gaza War of 2008-9…and nearly fifteen years later, they have lost none of their meaning for me.

Sometimes it seems like we learn nothing from our conversations. From 2012 when I addressed policymakers in international intervention in the UK, to this 2017 cover art for Kyle Grayson’s book on targeted killing and drones, the warnings have been clear from many well-informed people. Yet we just didn’t want to think too deeply about it. This May 2023 article by Gabriel Honrada in Asia Times triggered that sense of “again?” feeling…

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…