I’m tired, I can’t be bothered to hide my art behind filters anymore. Here it is, with apologises to @fkatwigs who inspired it. I did you no justice, and I truly wanted to make something great inspired by you.

The truth is that I am a “fair” artist at best. That was the assessment I was given by my York college art tutor when he looked at my laughable portfolio for the first time. I grew as an artist, but not enough, and that clearly frustrated my tutors (I had four for different aspects of creativity. Photography, sadly, was not one of them. I doubt I would’ve appreciated it at the time if it had been).

Why? I don’t know. Mostly because it was the only decent course I could qualify for that was highly unlikely to contain any of the horrible sociopaths who had made secondary school an utter living nightmare. And I was okay at it. Back then, you had to make as much GCSEs with Cs or above to make certain courses. I wanted to go for the holy grail: A Levels. Specifically English Language, English Literature. The other two would be Politics and Psychology.

After failing to achieve the desired grades (I was one C off), I took a year off trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I read through the entire Tolkien trilogy. Re-watched the whole series’ of Only Fools and Horses on TV Gold. I did basically everything I could to avoid thinking about The Future.

Then came the inevitable day.

I was given two options: get a job or work towards getting a career. Refuse either, and I had to leave altogether.p

I choose art. I came to like it.

But I love it more than I’ll ever have the talent to prove it. To prove my love.

And that’s that.