Jasper Queens

The economic cuts are coming.  We don’t know what this is going to mean to ‘me’.  Will ‘I’ have a job, a pension, a holiday?  Can I afford to be a ‘deficit denier?’ 
Life has become very retro: indecision and uncertainty afflict us and whilst on hold, I look for certainties, I look back. 
Will we be able to afford education or relocation, even redecoration or a life as I’ve known it?  Will we be amongst the ones cast adrift from the lullings of new everythings, amongst those credit-strapped who will be left out in the cold making do? 
Life has become retro: looking back, what have I done?  How did we deserve this?  Where have I been?  But forget ‘experiences’, is there anything from experience that I won’t be able to do again? 
Is there anything from experience, from imagination, that I need to do that will help me? 

I’ve had a wasp colony for neighbours this past summer.  Wasps and I rubbed along fine - they’re better company than flies, than mosquitos, shitful pigeons or scampering, gnawing rodents - and I’ve swept up this season’s worker-wasp corpses in numbers that impress me.  I am rather awed, they are fabulously marked handsome little creatures, jasper and black, and of course they can sting but they aren’t hunting me like mosquitos, or eating my food, or at least not in so disgusting a manner as flies do.  Wasps cut bits off clean, eat or take (wing) away. 
It’s October now and getting colder.  Jasper queens should be tucked up snug for over-wintering but they’re still cranny-hunting amongst the rafters in my studio, methodically quartering the skylights and buzzing about. 
It’s getting colder and we’ve waited for October to be told, but the cuts are no more clearly understood. 
Life has become very anxious: my options have shrunk and buzzing wasps busily going about house-hunting and planning ahead is unnerving me.  What do they know that I don’t?  Nothing useful to me, I know they’re just doing what wasps always do, but their instinctive certainty exposes my uncertainty.  If we are to fail, they could take over and admire jaspers as I do, I can’t be standing by allowing a wasp take-over.  It’s a species thing. 
With no other clear direction, I’m stirred to do my bit in our defence. 
How can you ‘kill’ at all is one question, I’m flapping to go on the offensive, but how could I kill buzzing pregnant females? 


Jasper on Yellow
The words ‘wasp’, ‘queen’, and ‘jasper’ carry many various connotations.  I’m not canny enough to attempt a pastiche embracing the range of meanings, although I wish I was. 

WORKS ON YELLOW

 All That Consoles, Aniconic, Aperitif, Apostate, Before Jefferson, Crisis, Cube:1-2-3, Default, Deflexion, detail, Dots, DREN, Field, Flowers, Hatchet, He Did It, Hubris, ION, Laid Out, m;m&m, Napoleon, Nomads, Orifice, Orifice 2, Over The Sink, Pentagon, Pivotal, PLA-3, Quatra, Rooves, Rule Of Law, Scribbler, Secular, Sex, Skirls:1-2-3-4, Sleep, Smart Artist, Spirit Hovel, Squiggles:3-II-I, Text, Thud and Blunder, Tracks:1-2, Triumph, Via Dolorosa, Writing, Writing 4.  54 works on yellow.

Works On Yellow
I have been working on yellow for a decade, longer perhaps in producing several hundred drawings on yellow paper, of which for a reason now forgotten, I had an abundance. 

I drew, discarded many, but the pile grew and it was with a twinge of panic in 2010 that I saw my cache of yellow paper had dwindled to single figures.  This size-this Yellow became too precious to use - I have to keep my remaining few yellow sheets safe for that super-special drawing that will never come - and no good can come from that thinking.  I have to find another colour, I had to run out on yellow to finish.

Works on Yellow are representative of the series as a whole - these 54 may be the cream but I don't judge that with any certainty.

In Works On Yellow I see the germ and kernels of paintings and prints, projects, stories, love affairs and loss, my attempts and speculation, campaigns; and idlings on once current affairs.  I see obsessions that no longer obsess me, interests I don't remember having - and haunting, prompting me now, issues that have led nowhere to date. 




The prefix 'PLA' that pervades Works On Yellow-online is an intrusive file-nomenclature which has a derivation I can't unravel.  Yellow paper from John Purcell Paper.