"What's My Name?"

WHAT’S MY NAME?
These drawings arose from the intention to create a residency during my show ‘Still Life’
It arose too from an ongoing sense of being somehow peripheral, always the child outside looking in. My ‘status’ as artist vis-vis other artists, artists on general so to speak has always been problematic for me. So how does it come about.
There is in the air now, and has been for some time, a sense of crisis of identity. National, singular, group, race, all seem to exude a sense of fragility whilst simultaneously brittle and uncompromising, as though slipping away in the face of contested definitions descriptions, valuations. There is a pressing from all directions to change direction, to be diverted , to follow the true path, a fightback to certainty of identity and belonging. This is who you are. This is who you should be. This is who you are not, cannot, be.
The upsurge of debate around racial issues, ‘Black Lives Matter’ cuts away, fractures and threatens, assumptions of skin. ‘Who are you?’ inevitably demands, ‘Who am I?’
In a tangential way I am attempting to put myself in context. My background is one of mixed nationality, an American father and an English mother. My Texan father was to a little boy a cowboy, an exotic visitor whose beginnings were a mixture of the real and the imagined, a fantasy floating around in a little boy’s head and that he appropriated as elements of himself.
This is not to mention the Indians, whose apparently noble savagery contained in a shimmering physique fought against the odds and white oppressors, which also fed my sense of mystery and myth, enabled by distance; those who are somehow displaced, not placed, find themselves always looking at the horizon, waiting for the world to be different, to fit the spaces of imagination.
And in this constant seeking of what might be a real home there is always an unbalance, a dichotomy, a sense of neither-nor which makes the name elusive, a difficult, slippery thing to pin down.