No! An Artist's Defence

Earlier this year, an unscrupulous operator filed a suit against my friend, the American artist, John T. Unger, in a federal court. They sought to overturn John's copyrights on a series of his works in order to sell unauthorised, unlicensed, mass-produced knockoffs of them.

John has spent over $50,000 in legal fees but because he was not the instigator of the suit, he now faces the risk of a default judgment being entered against him unless he is able to finance a full defence in court.

He cannot afford not to: the case poses the risk of a dangerous precedent being established that could be used by other imitators to strip artists of the rights which protect their original work.

You can read the full story on John's website.

To help John finance his defence, I've donated five, different coloured NO! images, each valued at $US1,000, from my limited edition series, the Yes/No Stencils for John to sell. As these are now hard to obtain even through my studio, John's edition, specially inscribed on the verso by both John and me, represents an opportunity to own an unique edition of the NO! images as well as help an artist locked in a desperate battle to protect his work and his income.

I would urge other artists to donate their work to help John's fight. For further information, visit John's blog – or just place an order.

Take Another Piece Of My Art

One of the best – and certainly the most provocative – of my 2008 Dangerous Career Babes series, The Terrorist, a 160cm x 210cm enamel painting on custom-built timber board, is to be auctioned on 16th December by Menzies Art Brands, in Sydney.

A smaller, 100cm x 150cm enamel on board work, Buck, one of the first Cowboy Babes, painted in 2001, is in the same sale. Another 100cm x 150cm painting from 2001, Career Babe: The Firefighter, was also to have been offered but this will now be auctioned by Menzies Art Brands in March, 2010.

The last time a Dangerous Career Babe turned up in the secondary market was at Christie's sale of Modern And Contemporary Australian And South African Art in London, in December, last year. The Aviatrix sold for $A32,701, exceeding the low-end of Christie's pre-sale estimate and setting a new record for my work at auction.

It's unlikely that the conservative Australian market will match this price, especially in an unsettled economic climate. I understand that Menzies has been very conservative in its estimate. However, The Terrorist is an excellent and widely recognised example not only of my recent enamel work but also my increasingly provocative intellectual engagement with the role media plays in defining (and undermining) modern female identities. I'm very proud of it.

Both paintings can be viewed at Menzies Art Brands' Melbourne gallery, 1 Darling St., South Yarra, Tel: 03 9832 8700, from 3rd to 6th December, 11am to 6pm, and at their Sydney gallery, 12 Todman Avenue, Kensington, Tel: 02 8344 5404, from 10th to 15th December, 11am to 6pm.

Paper Weightless

I always overwork my drawings when I'm getting used to a new medium but I'm at my worst with ink. It's new to me so I keep adding detail to a picture until it looks like a botched illustration or a frame from a bad graphic novel.

When I try to fix it, I overwork it some more. I'll black out whole areas to try to obliterate elements I don't need or to regain some sense of space. It doesn't help. Eventually, dense curtains of smeary ink obscure whatever it was I was working towards. The picture is an incoherent, irreparable mess.

I'm trying to pare down my drawings, to eliminate from them everything unnecessary. I resist the urge to 'fill' the page.

What I love most about working on paper is the paper itself. Between its porousness and unpredictable texture, a single good line can alight upon all kinds of subtleties in weight, shadow, movement and perspective. Make too many marks, allow too little space, and you can suffocate it.

One of my favourite works is The Bull, a series of 11 lithographs by Picasso. In the first three, the bull of the title is rendered realistically. In the fourth, the contours of the bull's solid body are traced, forming irregular but still three-dimensional shapes. As the series progresses, each unnecessary piece of line is removed until the bull becomes beautifully simple, if almost unrecogniseable. There is no shading, just an uneven, horizontal horizon line.

To me, the last version is much more engaging to look at than the others. It's as if the animal has been reduced to its essence.

I'm not planning to deconstruct my ink drawings in quite the same way. But Picasso's stark reductions have inspired me to recover the purity of line, emotion and texture that I've too often smothered with clutter.

The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Go To Texas

In March, next year, I'm traveling to the USA for the first time.

I've been invited to participate on a panel titled Millionaire Or Artist, How About Both?, convened by Amrita Chandra, of the Toronto-based Tinku Gallery and chaired by Hugh Macleod, at the SxSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. As well as being a renowned breeding ground and forum for new media ideas and technologies, the even better-known festival component of SxSW offers some kick-ass music.

I don't know much about Austin but any city with an Independent Business Alliance that promotes the slogan "Keep Austin Weird" sounds promising. I booked a room for a week at a cool boutique inn some distance from the chain-hotel headquarters for the event. The über-professional house manager added a personal touch to the confirmation email she sent me: "I checked out your website. Nice work. Very Queer. We like that here. I like the Self Vs Self. I wish fighting myself would look that sexy."

I'm not even there yet but my first impressions of Austin are funny, geeky, weird, sexy, and queer. I think I'm going to love it.

If Art Is War, I'm An Army

Just when I was desperate for it, tonight, I found inspiration in an old song by Björk. Written by the Icelandic singer with Graham Massey, in 1995, Army of Me was the first single released from her second CD, Post. It was also included on the soundtrack of the ill-fated movie, Tank Girl.

stand up
you've got to manage
i won't sympathize
anymore

and if you complain once more
you'll meet an army of me

you're alright
there's nothing wrong
self-sufficience please!
and get to work

and if you complain once more
you'll meet an army of me

you're on your own now
we won't save you
your rescue-squad
is too exhausted

and if you complain once more
you'll meet an army of me

L'Anno Che Verrá

After writing yesterday's entry, I decided to let my imagination run wild with some ideas about what might unfold for art and artists over the next ten years. These are the outtakes:

Artists will be the new pop stars. They'll have to tour constantly to promote their work as well as be subjected to the same sort of intrusive coverage by paparazzi as Kid Rock or P. Diddy.

Bi-sexuality will continue to be trendy and Sam Taylor-Wood will dump her young husband to take up with an aging Megan Fox, whom she'll cast in a re-make of The Hours.

After subjecting myself to Orlan-esque body modifications, I will become art's answer to Pamela Anderson – or Kim Kardashian, whichever.

In a reversal of a trend begun by Julian Schnabel and less successfully, Robert Longo, in the '80s and sustained by Sam Taylor-Wood until this year, film directors will aspire to become artists rather than the other way around (come on down, Tim Burton).

The mainstream audience will become increasingly art-savvy and Kevin McCloud will switch his attention from architects' and home-owners' Grand Designs to their aspirations as collectors. Unfortunately for artists, they'll be more discerning and demand more depth, development and relevancy in the work they actually buy.

Due to the loss of rudimentary artisan skills, a tragic by-product of a thirty year emphasis on post-modern theory rather than traditional, centuries-old practice, art schools will become irrelevant and be replaced by free, widely distributed, web-based, autonomous learning resources. Artists will re-learn 15th century skills and techniques through [gasp!] experimentation, practise, online research, and by viewing work by fellow artists.

Artspeak will only exist in academic libraries. The language died when a wider audience learned to translate it and discovered the banality of its messages. It will be studied by ethnologists as an anachronistic but doomed fad that owed its existence exclusively to conceptual art.

What used to be regarded as conceptual art will now be mainstream and the exclusive domain of advertising agencies desperate to try anything to reach mass audiences after the death of broadcast TV and newspapers.

Glossy art magazines will have replaced interior design magazines as the 'pornography' of the middle class, who will pay a premium to display them as paper editions on their Marc-Newson-for-Target coffee tables.

Takashi Murakami will become increasingly jaded as his ideas about democratising work are reduced to soul-less, auto-industry-style production lines. He will commit public seppuku in the foyer of the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi (Tokyo) in a bid to restore his honour as an artist.

Damien Hirst will pre-sell by auction a range of artworks to be manufactured after his death. One of the works will be his dead, dissected body preserved in formaldehyde. He will organise a world-wide, touring retrospective exhibition featuring his decaying corpse as its centre-piece – to be launched immediately after he passes away.

E-Bay rather than Sotheby's will handle the Hirst auction and in conjunction with Matthew Freud and Jay Jopling, will hype the event to drive up prices: indeed, the works will be auctioned several times over, for massively increasing amounts, even before Hirst dies. He will retain ownership of a small percentage of each work so his estate might participate in the rising value forever.

Dames Tracey Emin and Germaine Greer will establish an arcane cult that worships and sexually enslaves young men. Neither will see any irony in this. An ancient Jeffrey Smart will be invited to preside as High Priest over annual rites at an undisclosed location in Tuscany.

(Thanks to Italian singer-songwriter, Lucio Dalla, for the title.)

A Decade Done

"A new decade is a time in which to declare everything you know is wrong. A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new."

So writes Scottish musician and polymath, Nick Currie (better known as Momus) on his always thought-provoking 'blog, Click Opera. He offers some Eno-esque advice about where and how to look for the new. Before "groping around" myself, I thought I'd cast my eye over the "old" one last time – specifically, the ten year span of my professional career as a painter.

When I finally committed to the idea of myself as an artist, in late 1999, my ambitions were tempered by a lot of self-doubt. I had mounted three solo exhibitions – two at a commercial gallery. All of them had sold out. And yet I hadn't made enough money to cover the cost of materials. I was still living and working at my father's house. I held down a part-time job to make ends meet.

Then: My art dealer told me I had to chose between being commercially successful and critically admired. When I insisted that I intended to be both, she burst out laughing. I burst into tears. Secretly, I dreamed of my work hanging in major institutional collections.

Now: I choose not to be represented by any gallery or dealer. I produce my own exhibitions. My work enjoys commercial and critical success but I've also helped drive a global revolution in art marketing and communications. My work has been exhibited in a number of institutional galleries but it has yet to feel as good as I'd imagined. I have a great home and studio of my own, a couple of good assistants, and my earnings during the past four years add up to over a million dollars. Unfortunately, so have my outgoings – but that will change.

Then: I dreamed of being able to work full-time on art, and of making only bold art about which I was passionate. I wanted to be travel regularly and exhibit overseas but I wanted to live on a cliff facing the sea. I thought I might achieve one of these things within 20 years, if I was lucky.

Now: I work only on my art. I would still like it to be bolder, more experimental. I've travelled as much as I've wanted during the last couple of years and I've been in a handful of solo and group shows in the USA, the UK and Japan. I live on a cliff-top above the Pacific Ocean, in a fashionable suburb north of Sydney.

Then: I believed that the internet might become quite useful for artists, even if I wasn't quite sure how.

Now: The internet still hasn't been used in a groundbreaking way to make new forms of art. But it has liberated artists from an oppressive, male-dominated, commercial and institutional gallery system and given us greater control over the way we communicate the ideas and intentions of our work and how and where it is sold. It has also enabled direct, unmediated dialogue with all those who take an interest in it, wherever they happen to be.

Pain And Penance

This morning, I dragged my ever-widening ass to the gym.

I don't like gyms. They make me feel like a lab rat running on an exercise wheel. The pumping music, punctuated by the neanderthal grunts and parade ground barks of class instructors (in between their patrons' inane chatter about fat loss ) get on my nerves.

I turn up my iPod and tune into the rhythm of constant motion and long steady breaths. As long as I can block everything out, it's like a form of meditation. My shaved head and austere, asexual, dark clothing make me look like a six-foot monk amongst a room of Ken and Barbie dolls.

After a couple of hours, the fog and white noise that cloud my mind have cleared. Serotonin levels upped, the anxiety that every morning wakes me with clenched fists and grinding teeth has dissipated. I'm calm, maybe even happy.

Ever obsessive-compulsive, I weigh myself, measure my waist and hips, and take note of my heart-rate.

I'm already looking forward to fitting the high-priced clothes hanging in my wardrobe again but aesthetic changes aren't my goal. I do this to stay sane, to be productive. Nothing else works as well.

Opening Another Vein

I took some time out to untangle my thoughts about where I want to go next with my work. The last time I did this in earnest was in early 2006. The result: the works that became Venus In Hell. I don't have any sense yet of what might come of this, although I suspect it'll be messy, violent, dark and different to what I've done before.

I started by writing down all the things I've tried not to think about for a long time: things that have made me angry or ashamed, things I've tried to forget. Not all of them make sense now although sometimes I stumbled upon clues that helped me resolve puzzles that have bothered me for years. I tried to stay detached and unemotional – it wasn't easy – so I could mine as much unrefined data as possible. I didn't stop to think or reflect. If I couldn't find the right words, I drew small pictures to come back to later.

Truth is, I was afraid to stop. If I did, I might have felt I was losing my grip. My head was (still is) full of random images – like fragments of raw film footage – snatches of dialogue and faint, half-forgotten tastes and smells, all jumbled together. The key was not to try to sort them out, to edit them, but to keep going, to let it all spill out in one, purging stream-of-consciousness.

I still have no idea whether I can make art out of any of it.

Nowhere To Hide

Hey! Said my name is called disturbance.
I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants.

– Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Street Fighting Man

Let me restate a basic policy for this blog. I am open to critical remarks about my work or me. I've published many here over the past three years and I will continue to do so. But if you're not willing to identify yourself, if you do it anonymously, I'll just trash what you have to say.

I used to to publish everything, including anonymous insults and slander. I figured my readers would notice that the vilest comments come from three distinct groups:the first are mostly fellow artists or art dealers who are envious or resentful of the public 'me' or who just hate my art – interestingly, this angry, misogynistic group is made up almost entirely of middle-aged, white Australian males; the second are spiteful former acquaintances (or jilted lovers) who have an axe to grind; finally, there are those geekish, dull-witted trolls who get a kick out of spilling vitriol over anyone with any 'surface' in the blogosphere.

It's easy enough to identify posters, even when they use different aliases. If they're really nasty or threatening, I run their IP address and keep a note of where they route to. Mostly, I know who they are from their own words. For example, there's the guy about whom I wrote recently here: he was pissed off that I addressed his sexism in public – after all, he is, as he kept reminding me, one of my 'collectors'. Before I wrote the blog, I emailed him privately and he didn't respond. He continues to make snarky, ill-informed, anonymous critiques of me on others' blogs.

If someone says something stupid or insulting to me, they're not entitled to my silence. Ditto if they try to take advantage of me.

A number of late middle-aged, white male art dealers are livid that I unwrap the exploitative and often (again) misogynistic business practices I've experienced with them. In their eyes, I am only an artist – and a female one at that.

Unfortunately for them, I am also a successful woman who won't abide by the accepted, "be-seen-but-not-heard-and-be-bloody-grateful-you've-got-it" conventions of female success. The art world is traditionally dominated by men but I'm not grateful to them or eager-to-please. I'm not meek, modest, obsequiously deferent either. I don't give in or dumb myself down. I haven't slept with anyone to advance my career and I've never been supported by a man, other than my father.

Instead, every day, I live and work in the open. I expose my art, my self, my work practice and the worst of me online, where everyone can see. And I don't give a toss whom it pisses off.

The over-emotional, often obsessive, confused and enraged responses of those who attack me anonymously acknowledges a radical shift in power. The privilege they once took for granted suddenly doesn't apply any more. Race, gender, social standing and age are of no relevance to the new, web-based world, which empowers and equalises in ways early feminists could never have imagined. At last, women – and everyone else who has been disadvantaged by patriarchal systems – can play on the same, level playing field.

The anonymous posting of a spiteful, slanderous, vitriolic attack is just a desperate, ill-fated attempt to regain some of that lost power. The anonymous ranter can criticise (and slander) without exposing their motives to close examination or their ideas to detailed counter-argument or criticism. They also think they don't have to take responsibility for their own words, assuming (wrongly) that their legal identities and liabilities are obscured. Their's is a last, desperate attempt to influence, to exert a power they don't have anymore (if they ever had it), without responsibility.

Enough is enough. From now on, I won't publish any more unpleasant crap from anonymous posters. I will continue to publish reasoned, critical comments by those who display their real identity. I'm not bothered by those who disagree with me or who find my art disasteful or even just plain bad. I relish conflicting ideas about art and everything else (well, almost everything else).

As those who've followed this blog for a few years know, I don't run from a fight. Actually, I like to fight. But I've got too little time to indulge those impotent dullards and wankers who are too cowardly to 'own' their own words. They can just fuck off.

Shortening The Supply Chain

When it comes to paint and painting supplies, I prefer to order well in advance – preferably in bulk – and be assured of specific delivery times. I always check on the minimum quantity the supplier will deliver for free and the minimum spend required for an ongoing trade discount. I want to track orders and check them as they arrive so that any mistakes can be rectified immediately.

I spent all day, today, driving through the monotonous sprawl of Sydney's far western suburbs to a paint distributor that stocked a particular brand of enamel I wanted. I got lost. I got stuck on traffic-clogged freeways with no exits for miles. Hot, sweaty and pissed off, I finally found the operation. It was a well-organised, air conditioned oasis set among hundreds of others catering to building trades.

A competent-looking woman set up an account for me, She emailed me a password to a website so I could check the store's inventory before making future orders online. I made sure I got her name so I could deal with her again.

I used to order my materials through art stores until it began to remind me of working with art dealers. Having a 'middle man' is supposed to save time but it only makes the process more difficult. Communication works best when it's direct, not relying on other people. Having made the effort to visit the distributor and set up a relationship, I can now manage this crucial part of my logistics online and yet still have the comfort of personal contact if its needed.

Uncringing

One of the most widely distributed articles about me online, last year, was a critical perspective of my marketing efforts titled Art Vs. Marketing: Making Hazel Dooney Cringe by Barney Davey. For several months, I kept tripping over excerpts of it on nearly every art-related blog I visited. It prompted me to write a brief response here.

Against all odds, Barney and I have remained cordial. Now he has published a long profile of me, Hazel Dooney: A Courageous Uncompromising And Successful Visual Artist on his widely read blog, Art Print Issues. In it, he attempts to distill the lessons to be learnt from my career but warns those who might be tempted to follow them, "While the international success she has achieved undoubtedly is the envy of lots of other artists, it is unlikely many are willing to follow her example. Study her blog and career and you will find her art, life and career inextricably entwined in a most deeply personal consumptive manner. For many, if not most, the price she pays to be the artist she wants to be is too dear."

I suspect regular readers of this blog will have already made up their own minds about that.

Letting Me Be Myself

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.

– Gabrielle Bonheur 'Coco' Chanel

If we are told something again and again, it can become true. It can seep into our subconscious and take hold there as an indisputable fact. It doesn't even matter if we know it's not true.

I was bullied in high school by people who were close to me: not physical violence just harsh, twisted whispers. I heard them so often I took them to heart.

Repetition in advertising and political propaganda works the same way. Even if we see through the manipulative messages, it's hard not to be affected by them. Inventions and interpretations become fact, as immutable as the sun rising in the east.

I once believed a whole gamut of 'truths' about myself, most of them instilled in me by my family from childhood. Some were good, some weren't. As I grew up and became an adult, I realised there were no such truths.

I still struggle to rid myself of some of them. People often cite their family as a reason for not pursuing their dreams. If we turn our back on our families, if we reject their comments and criticisms we risk being rejected ourselves. It's hard to confront – let alone argue with – people whom we love and who have nurtured us. It's even harder to comprehend that they don't always have our best interests at heart but rather their own.

Too often, what we are told by our parents, siblings and closest friends – again and again – becomes what we tell ourselves. Over time, it also becomes the way others define us and how we define ourselves. Re-defining oneself can be hard. In my case, it felt impossible.

In the end, it was utterly liberating. Living only on my own terms turned my world upside down. The woeful, discouraging, critical voices continued to harp on – even louder when I started to ignore them completely – but they were countered by an intoxicating rush of happiness and freedom, a real sense that I could do and be anything.

The relief was absolute.

In My Room

As I convert more of my home into working space, my bedroom has become my refuge. Its shelves are crammed with books and personal mementoes, among them a trussed, scarified Barbie doll from my Voodoo-inspired Venus In Hell exhibition, a miniature chess set, necklaces of bones, beads and glass, peacock feather earrings, a Moroccan bowl overflowing with a collection of sex toys, an old, painted Balinese buddha head enhanced with a spiked leather choker, photographs with diaristic, hand-written inscriptions, a Blyth doll given to me by a couple of favourite collectors, my private journals – even a glow-in-the-dark plastic Holy Mary.

Until a couple of years ago, all these possessions would have felt like unbearable clutter. I would have given them away or packed them in boxes. Now, I find them comforting. My bedroom is a cocoon. It's familiar, filled with things I love from people and places I love.

Snake Oil

A couple of days ago, I came across a marketing blog that referred to my much-publicised, public declaration of artistic and commercial independence and an attitude I summed in a self-penned catch-phrase: Art Is War. The blog's author, Cory Huff, works as a 'Blogging and Social Media Specialist' for a marketing firm, Netbiz.com.

In his blog, Huff co-opts my phrase, using it as the title for an event he is organising called the Art Is War Workshop. The workshop promises to explore the key elements of my success and the success of others like me. I don't know Huff. I certainly didn't give him permission to use my name to spruik his own schtick. I have nothing to do with the event.

In discussing how to circumvent a system in which art dealers are (as I see it) predatory middle men, Huff promotes his own services as a middle man despite having no deep experience of art. The workshop is free, a common strategy among commercial 'mentors' to generate sales of further information and paid guidance. However, everything an artist needs to know is freely available online already, not least from my blog and the interviews I give (for which a very complete Bibliography on my web site provides links), as well as blogs such as Hugh McLeod's smart Gaping Void. Both Hugh and I make ourselves very accessible to those wanting to know more.

There are those who innovate, then there are those who follow behind making money talking about – and completely missing the point of – what we do and why. More and more art marketing sites are springing up, targeting gullible artists and artisans who want to sell their work online. Some are positioned as services by artists for artists. Others are unashamedly opportunistic middle-men with smooth patter and no real knowledge or experience of art at all.

Oddly, none waste much time on art itself – let alone exploring the core importance of creating a body of work. And yet the concepts of an artist's work are integral to the ways in which each artist should share it. (Which is also to say that what works for one artist might not work for another). Articulating the work should be the main focus of using new media, with sales a welcome side-effect, not the main purpose.

A Fresh Outlook

Having cleared out the furniture and everything else from three rooms, it will take another full day of hard work to clean both my home and studio. Then I'll re-organise them so that they're more comfortable as well as practical.

I've decided to postpone my move to the city and I'll abandon the enamel factory in Sydney's south-west. For the time being, I'll work on large enamels in my home studio, making space for them at one end of the modestly sized but bright, well-ventilated space I have overlooking the sea. It might not be ideal for such a noxious medium – I expect the fumes will infiltrate the rest of the house – but I won't have to drive five hours to get to and from it. During those moments when the stress (or the smell) gets too much, I can escape to the nearby beach.

I still have to find a competent painting assistant, which won't be easy this far from the city. Maybe the view will tempt someone with good skills to commute. With summer just around the corner, there are worse jobs.

Undone

I had to take some time off to get my life back on the rails.

I have worked nearly 18 hours a day, every day, for the past six months, ensuring a slow but steady output from both my studios. I haven't had any time for myself. A week ago, I realised that I was living in the sort of squalor you read about in those stories where the neighbours notify the police of a 'strange smell' coming from the house next door and they discover a long-dead bag lady buried under piles of decaying rubbish in the living room.

It wasn't just 'artistic' mess – discarded paper, tubes of glue, empty paint pots, hardened brushes, and broken segments of pencil or charcoal – although there was plenty of that. There were layers of grime, dried salt spray, food particles, and drink stains on every surface atop which were strewn unwashed clothes, stale underwear and even a handful of lube-sticky tissues. In between were skewed piles of reference books, unpaid bills and other papers, and tipped-over cardboard file boxes spilling their contents under chairs, the daybed, coffee table and desk.

The physical disarray underscored just how far I had let tiredness deteriorate into an increasingly disordered mental state. Exhaustion had overwhelmed my working and living spaces just as it had my health. I decided to stop working for a week. It was only then I recognised the bad shape I was in. For a few days, it was all I could do to stop crying and catch up on lost sleep. When I woke this morning, I was calm for the first time in a month.

The long, slow process of cleaning my house is penance – I can't afford to let myself slip into this state again. It also gives me time to figure out how I'm going to do things differently.

Running Out

Three weeks ago, I offered readers of this blog an opportunity to purchase my first, large-scale serial work, the Yes/No Stencils.

Two images, each 40cm x 60cm (or 15.7” x 23.6”), hand-stencilled in high gloss enamel on 64cm x 86cm (or 25.2" x 33.9") 100% cotton, museum-quality, white Alpharag 4ply archival board, are available in five editions of 25 signed and numbered (on front) prints of each image, in five different colours: faux-fluorescent lime, Dooney pink, industrial safety orange, papal purple and pitch black.

There is also a sixth, 'artist's proof' edition of just 10 prints of each image, signed and numbered, in virginal white gloss enamel on matt white board.

The response has been extraordinary. Within just a few days of the editions being announced on October 5th, nearly half the stencils (in all colours) were sold. This was gratifying because the stencils were an attempt to put my work within the reach of those who wanted to own my work but could not afford the five-figure prices for my large enamel on timber board paintings.

However, good things have to come to an end. Especially with the U.S. dollar plummeting in value against the Australian dollar.

On November 5th, the few remaining stencils will be increased in price to align with the valuations for similar works of mine now in the market. The coloured editions will rise to $US1,000 (from $US500) while the more limited white-on-white editions will rise to $1500 (from $US750). From that date, there will be no discounts for purchases of the full set (six stencils, in all colours) of either – or both – the YES? or NO! images.

For further information, or to order one of the remaining stencils, please contact my studio. Those who have already ordered one or more prints can expect delivery after 5th November, when the painstaking process of printing, drying/hardening, and packaging will be completed and all works consigned.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Success should have given me the freedom to do what I want, when I want. So why am I unable to devote every day to making art? I've become encumbered by the business my art generates: marketing, sales, collector relationships, exhibition logistics, consignment, transport, materials specification and ordering, staff supervision, accounting, correspondence, and phone calls (so many phone calls).

It's not that I dislike these responsibilities. I enjoy them, a lot. But too often, if I don't get through them all within the time I allot, everything begins to spin out of control and I am unable to concentrate on painting – or anything else. If I'm going to enjoy the independence I've fought so hard to gain, I have to figure out how to make it work better for me. Fast.

I'm a control freak. It's related to the serious mood disorder I suffer, which, at different times, pits two completely opposite poles of my personality against each other.

This can be seen in my art: on the one hand, precisely organised series of tightly controlled enamel paintings, with brittle, gleaming, seamless surfaces and on the other, loose (to the point of anarchic), stream-of-consciousness watercolours and ink drawings. The process of painting in enamel soothes an anal, obsessive-compulsive desire for precision, repetition and perfectionism. It affirms my ability to be in control. The watercolours free me from the disordered thoughts and chaotic emotions that too often undo my self-disciplined life.

Success has driven my life out of control. Now, I have to stop it.

After a year or so experimenting with two very different, geographically separate spaces, one for my enamel paintings, the other for everything else, I've decided to assemble all my studio processes under one roof. Commuting several hours a day in heavy traffic wastes time in which I could be making art.

Not being in one space all day, to supervise and provide guidance to assistants, also wastes time because mistakes are made in line, colour or technique when I am not there to advise or do the work myself. Often, the paint has dried by the time I get to see errors so the surface has to be sanded back and repainted with several coats. Each re-applied coat takes a full day – and, sometimes, two – to dry. And each error not only costs money – materials, salaries, progress lost on other works – but also tries the patience of collectors.

I am moving my studios and home to a multi-level structure closer to Sydney, where I'll have access to a bigger pool of skilled personnel and at the same time, be a lot more accessible to my collectors, advisers and suppliers. Where I am now, even an office supplies store is a thirty minutes drive away.

I've reduced my assistants' and my tasks to a daily 'one-sheet'. I've done these simple to-do and who-to-call lists infrequently in the past – they made me feel more like a business executive than an artist – but they're extraordinarily effective. They keep my constantly shifting schedule and responsibilities in plain sight and update those around me who need to know what I'm up to.

On the other hand, I've stopped caring about my young staff's personal lives. I've had to remind myself that they're not my friends but my employees and our only relationship is in the studio. This might sound callous but if I ensure my own emotional issues are left outside the studio, everyone else must as well. My studio is emphatically not a democracy but a benign dictatorship.

These and other changes are not just about organising my time, energy and resources better. They're also about keeping my unruly mental health in check.

Naively, I've been clinging to the idea that one day, I would wake up and the bi-polar affective disorder I've suffered my whole life would be gone. Most of the people with whom I work don't notice its worst effects – or so I tell myself – but I have to manage it closely with medication, hard exercise, and simple food, rich in Omega-3.

From here on in, I want to be driving my life and career, rather than being driven by it. It's not really a question of being a control freak. It's about being neither a victim nor a stooge.

A Point Just Passed

"No wonder you're late. Why, this watch is exactly two days slow."

- The Mad Hatter, from Alice In Wonderland

People tell me they would love to be an artist. But they always make excuses: there isn't enough time or money, there's no guarantee of being able to make a living. I wonder why they don't apply the same analysis to everything else they do. They have time for a regular job, even if they hate it; they manage to drag themselves to it when they're under-paid, undervalued, exhausted and sick.

Why is it such a big step to sacrifice this grind for something that will provide a deal more spiritual, emotional and social satisfaction? There's no guarantee that you will make a lot of money, that's true. But that's no different to an ordinary McJob. And in the economic new order to which we're all subjected, a steady job (and the equal opportunity to succeed in it) is a myth.

People invest a lot of time and money to study – and qualify for – well-paying, high status careers in business, law, medicine and the sciences. They accept that there's a narrow window of opportunity through which they have to squeeze if they're to succeed. Even if they're highly qualified, this success will depend, in part, on luck, making the right connections, and how much drive and self-belief they can muster. They will be measured constantly and if found wanting, discarded in favour of a better equipped competitor.

One of the most difficult things for most of us to accept is that as soon as a moment has passed, it's gone forever. Putting off something – or procrastinating about it – is a vain attempt to stop time. Every day brings a whole new set of demands and priorities.

Which is why those who really want to be artists have to start right now. If they put it off, the chance might be gone forever.

Mind(Less)

"I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life."

- Jean-Michel Basquiat

I control my emotions when I paint with enamel. When I paint with watercolours or draw in ink, I let them all out.

I don't think about technique, composition or colour. I try not to think at all. Instead, I probe the tender areas within myself to reach feelings I've suppressed. I revisit emotional experiences – heartache, love, death, happiness, obsessions, dreams, nightmares – and with them, memories that once I might have tried to erase. There are also images that have seeped into my subconscious from elsewhere: fragments from other people's paintings or photographs, scenes from movies, TV documentaries or music videos, incidents glimpsed through the windscreen of my car, descriptions I've read in poetry or a novel, or lurid fantasies that exist only in my head.

The result isn't random or a matter of luck. Somewhere between my imagination and a blank sheet of paper, the coagulated spill of feelings and visions acquires coherency, revealing some underlying intention. For better or worse, it becomes art.

Talking To Myself?

After a hard, frustrating week at the enamel factory, I had to take a few days off. I avoided logging onto my computer or answering my 'phones. I tried not to think about anything to do with art. If it hadn't been for a diligent assistant, I might have missed an email from Mark McGuinness, co-founder of Lateral Action, letting me know that he had just posted a long interview he had done with me on his site.

In many ways, this is a 'companion' piece to an interview I did with Hugh McLeod, of Gaping Void, just three months ago. It develops my argument (which risks becoming something of a manifesto) for artists' increased independence from the 'traditional' gallery system. It even takes its title from the new sub-title of this blog – Art Is War – to convey, in part, the rigour and commitment such independence demands to make it successful.

I look forward to reading artists' and galleries' reactions to the interview, either at Lateral Action or here.

Not A Hard Sell

On Friday, the Head of Art at a respected Australian auction house, Menzies Art Brands, emailed to tell me that two more of my early works, Buck and Career Babe: The Firefighter (above), have been consigned for a sale on December 16. Later, we spoke on the phone about the condition of the paintings, their history, and more generally, about the archival properties of enamel paint.

A couple of years ago, my opinions about my own work were dismissed by a rival auction house. Now my insights and expert knowledge are sought by senior staff members at all that sell my work – and these days, my work is included in nearly every major auction of Australian art. When my work is offered by Christie's, in London, I'm in regular contact with their staff – a number of whom follow this blog.

The first time I ever had anything to do with an auction house was when Menzies Art Brands emailed me for permission to reproduce my work in their print and online catalogues. If I hadn't been representing myself, I wouldn't have heard a word. The staff were surprised when I went to the sale preview to check the condition of the work for a collector who was interested in buying it and they were gob-smacked when I emailed additional, useful background information. However, it didn't take them long to 'get' it. Now, the information I send is included in the print catalogue, where my work is always given prominence.

My independence from the traditional primary market has had only positive effects on the regard for my work – and me – in the secondary market, where the financial value of even the most famous artists' works and reputations are tested in public. The idea that artists who manage themselves aren't taken seriously in this market is as dead as the Dodo.

No matter what old-school commercial galleries keep telling us, contact between independent artists and even the largest auction houses is not just accepted – it's welcomed. Auction houses recognise that artists who understand the function of auctions and who care not only about the condition of work offered for sale but also about contributing to its long-term value are a resource that enhances their efforts.

Remember, too, artists don't make any money on the sale of work through the auction house, which is usually acting on behalf of collectors who insist on anonymity even from the artist. However, we work together on the basis that the interests of the auction house, the collector and the artist are parallel.

Commercial galleries do their damnedest to discredit artists who work outside the traditional system – the so-called primary market – because they believe a lack of complete control will undermine the influence (such as it is) they exert on their collector base and their income. It's a short-sighted and stupid attitude.

As collaborations between artists and auction houses are demonstrating – look at Damien Hirst's incredible pre-crash marketing and sales coup with Sotheby's – the benefits for galleries who work with artists on equal terms far outweigh the meagre risks.

I Love The Smell Of Napalm

The SMS popped up on my iPhone as I sprawled on the daybed in my studio, sipping my first coffee of the day. Four words: You're such a wanker. I didn't have to look to know whom it was from.

Less than half an hour before, an art dealer had called to berate me for my blog entry, The Ka-Boom Of The System, a couple of days ago. Did he think my account was inaccurate or unfair? Maybe. He didn't say.

What angered him most was that I had written anything at all.

Time was, not so long ago, artists had to be wary of crossing swords with art dealers, even those with modest reputations. One bad word from them could put a crimp in a promising career. But the art world post-Web 2.0 is different. I felt no fear, just a sliver of pity – for the dealer, not myself – as he muttered, "You've blown it. You've really blown it."

No, I haven't.

Performance Arse

From the beginning of my career as an artist, men have made the mistake of thinking that the strong, sexy women in my paintings are me.

At a gallery party, a few years ago, a middle-aged executive type looked me up and down and said, "You're different to what I thought you'd be."

He took my silence as an invitation to describe some twisted fantasy derived from the gun-toting women in my Lake Eyre series of enamel paintings: "I figured a white, tight wife-beater, denim cut-offs, oh, and long boots, as if you were, y'know, up for anything."

"Up for anything," I repeated, blankly. How had I ended up in a conversation with a dickhead like him?

"Yeah," he said. "I'd show you to my mates and pay for you and me to fly to..." I walked away, leaving him to talk to the empty space where I'd stood.

As my reputation as an artist grew, I expected never again to have these sorts of encounters. I've fought hard to be respected and I've taken every opportunity to articulate in public the post-feminist perspective of my work. The severe, monochrome, shaven-skull head-shot of me used on this blog and in all my publicity materials makes it plain that I'm not exactly user-friendly when it comes to sexist fools.

Today, I received an email from a married, 30-something guy who bought a painting from me a few years back. He and a friend – who "also owns one of your works" – were throwing a stag party for "an avid art collector". The theme of the stag night was to be an art exhibition so he was "just wondering" whether I'd consider (as a favour to them, as collectors) "tastefully painting" the groom-to-be "naked with some props" as a kind of performance piece in front of the other party goers.

At first, I tried to stifle my astonishment and anger. Then I thought, why the hell should I? I emailed back and told him bluntly that I had no interest at all in this puerile idea. I also asked him whether such a proposition would have been put to me if I was a late middle-aged, male artist.

Probably not.

Recession, Yes And No

I want a new generation of collectors to have more access to my work.

My enamel paintings have done very well at auction in London, Sydney and Melbourne over the past two years, with even very early works achieving prices that are 1,000 per cent over their original purchase prices. Unfortunately, they are now out of reach of many (especially those my age and younger) who might be interested in owning my work.

To remedy this, I recently offered a dozen very small works on paper – Recession Originals – for just 72 hours, only to readers of my blog and my 2,500 followers on the online social network, Twitter. All were priced at just $US275. They sold out within 24 hours. A further six works were added; these sold out within 12 hours.

This response encouraged me to produce my first, large-scale serial work, the Yes/No Stencils. They comprise two complementary images: NO! and YES?.

Each of the images is 40cm x 60cm (or 15.7” x 23.6”), hand-stencilled in high gloss enamel on 64cm x 86cm (or 25.2" x 33.9") 100% cotton, museum-quality, white Alpharag 4ply archival board.

There are five editions of 25 signed and numbered (on front) prints of each image, in five different colours: faux-fluorescent lime, Dooney pink, industrial safety orange, papal purple and pitch black.

There is also a sixth, 'artist's proof' edition of just 10 prints of each image, signed and numbered, in virginal white gloss enamel on matt white board.

It's intended that different versions of the same – or opposite – messages can be hung together.

The coloured NO! and YES? prints are priced at $US500 each unframed (Euros 350.00 for European orders or $A640.00 for Australian/New Zealand orders), including GST (for Australian orders only) and delivery.

The white NO! and YES? prints are priced at $US750 each unframed (Euros 515.00 or $A940.00), including GST (for Australian orders only) and delivery.

One set of six NO! or YES? prints – five colours plus white – is priced at $US3,200.00 unframed (Euros 2,200.00 and $A4,375.00), including GST (for Australian orders only) and delivery.

Both sets of six, 12 prints in all – in five colours plus white – are priced at $US6,400.00 unframed (Euros 4,400 and $A8,750.00), including GST (for Australian orders only) and delivery.

To order or request further information, please contact Priya at dooneystudio@gol.com. Payment can be accepted via PayPal – yes, I've finally caved in to persistent requests – Western Union or national or international bank transfer.

Hostage To My Independence

If there's one drawback to handling my own sales and marketing, it's the hours each week I have to put aside to promote and sell my own work.

I blog and tweet with a regularity that puts some professionals to shame. I ensure that my web site, which is intended to be more an exhaustive reference resource about my work and career rather than a sales tool, is kept updated. There is a monthly e-newsletter – Studio Notes – to write and email to over 7,000 subscribers each month, as well as a monthly media release to another two or three hundred individuals.

But the core of my non-art activities are dozens of phone calls, emails and meetings with existing and potential collectors.

I don't often welcome visitors to my studios – these are reserved for my most ardent collectors, for whom I host occasional lunches in my cliff-top garden, a couple of hundred feet above a Pacific Ocean the color of lapis lazuli. I prefer email and the phone to personal contact. Nevertheless, I ensure not only that I'm always accessible to collectors and fans but also enthusiastically communicative about new series that are available for commission, works in progress, and works that are for sale directly from other collectors. I also have a small network of non-gallery art dealers, corporate curators and recently auction houses (acting as brokers) through which I channel a small volume of selected works.

Incidentally, if you are one of those who believe that big-money collectors need to see a work in real life before spending five or six figures on it, think again. Major auction houses routinely receive bids for works priced upwards of a million dollars from buyers who have never set foot in their show rooms. My own experience is that if an artist's brand is well regarded, a buyer won't hesitate to spend tens of thousands of dollars without having seen anything but a digital image of the work.

Apart from sales, there are self-produced shows as well as those produced in partnership with smart gallery owners who don't insist on the conventional terms of trade with an artist. I have, so far, six of these planned in the next eighteen months and apart from actually producing the work, I'll have to spend days dealing with the logistics of framing, packing and shipping work, travel bookings, collating and distributing press materials, and supervising the design of posters, postcard, t-shirts, magazine advertising and invitations. I have a very clear vision of my image and message for every show and I am loathe to leave to anyone else to ensure its communicated properly.

Last but not least, like any business, I have accounts to balance, staff to take care of and taxes to pay. I do as much of the paperwork as I can before handing it off to a very smart accountant (and collector) to assemble into statements or returns. When I first hired her, my income was less than $A300 a week after tax: now I spend that on coffee and snacks for my crew.

As I keep saying, independence has its price. Or, rather, its ransom.

The Ka-Boom Of The System

A well-regarded gallery owner came to visit me at the enamel factory yesterday. We have known each other for several years but we had renewed our acquaintance just a couple of weeks ago when I raised with him the possibility of mounting an exhibition at his space in the latter half of 2010. The point of his visit was to seal the deal.

I made fresh coffee and served delicate, mousse-like cakes from my favourite Chinese patisserie. He said how much he liked my new paintings. He also told me that I looked both well and happy. We sat in front of a new, large enamel painting in pretty colours and started to talk about exhibition dates.

Then things went awry.

The gallery owner assumed that my commitment to an exhibition also meant my agreement to local representation. It hadn't been mentioned before. It wasn't enough that he'd make forty percent on sales of the works included in the show. He wanted commission on the sale of all future works to all Sydney-based collectors, even those whose interest in my work I had nurtured for years.

In addition to this commission, he wanted every Sydney-based collector who contacted me to be referred immediately to the gallery and any further contact with me discouraged.

I told him, politely, I didn't work that way. I explained that my individual relationship with everyone who was interested in my work, whether they were collectors or not, was enormously important to me and I went into some detail about how my online presence – through a heavily trafficked web site, a 'blog, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn – encouraged constant contact.

The gallerist didn't know what Twitter was, and I suspect, hadn't actually ever read a 'blog – let alone mine. When I mentioned that he could see how transparently I lived and worked through my blog, he thought I'd said 'blood'. Even the word 'blog' was unfamiliar.

Still, we talked around the stumbling block of his insistence on representation a little more even though I knew the relationship was doomed and I should withdraw.

After he'd finished his coffee and cake, I walked him to the end of a long work table covered with paint cans and work debris to a clear space where my stencil prototype lay on glassine paper. I talked a little about how it was created and why.

As he had with all the other work, he told me how much he liked it but I realised that he hadn't been listening: he suggested I do the stencil image as a giclée prints.

"As you know, artists can't do traditional colour prints anymore," he said, somewhat archly (and wrongly). "So they're printed in ink." Ink as in ink-jet printing. The last thing I wanted to do were giclée reproductions – which he would have known had he read my last entry here.

The gallery owner left before I could tell him that I wasn't going to exhibit with him. I called him as he was driving away in his large, shiny, foreign-built car. Politely, I insisted I was looking for an exhibition, not representation.

This provoked him to give me the same lecture I had first heard from another gallery owner over a decade ago. A little too loudly, he boasted that other artists were proud to be represented by him and respected what his gallery stood for. He went on to tell me that by joining his gallery, I would benefit from the gallery brand. Gallerists always talk about brand with very little understanding that a brand is not just a well-known name: it is inextricable from a set of clearly identifiable values and attitudes.

I replied that – if we were speaking in those terms – I already had my own brand, so I didn't need his gallery's. "If anything," I said, my own voice rising a little, "my partnerships with galleries are about co-branding. And in every instance, my brand brings benefits equal or superior to the gallery's."

The gallerist moved on quickly, telling me he didn't want to be 'used' for his space, and that the gallery would need a return for its "significant" investment in me during the exhibition. I pointed out that, quite apart from the fact that I usually bore the brunt of advertising and promotional costs for my exhibitions, the hefty commission on works his gallery could sell immediately before, during and for 60 days after the exhibition, not to mention the media attention my shows always generate, would be a more than generous return – on the space and on their time and effort.

His tone became emotional, angry: "What am I supposed to do if I am at a dinner party and someone asks if I represent you? What am I supposed to say?"

"Simply? No," I said.

"Look, you can't have your cake and eat it too," he blurted.

I laughed. The exchange was slipping out of his control, an unfamiliar experience for him when dealing with a young artist.

The gallery owner's last, weak jab was to tell me that his gallery worked to a specific structure, for which I had no respect because I didn't have one. I told him that my studio structure was probably as well or better organised than his but as it was now clear to me that our methods of working would not be compatible, I suggested we end the conversation.

Of course, the 'structure' that old-school galleries like to talk about is nothing more than the same 'middle-man' system used by everyone from mortgage brokers to car dealers: a system in which artists are little more than suppliers of product which is then given 'shelf space' on a sale-or-return basis. In return, galleries 'mark up' the work with commissions that can reach as high as 60 per cent and are rarely less than 40, and the artist gets few, if any, back-office benefits like accounting, tax planning, inventory management, or strategic career advice.

Even skilled marketing and communications are a stretch.

Moreover, art dealers (and artists) of the old school don't want to accept that 'regional' art markets now exist on a much larger scale than mere cities. There's a world-wide community of collectors and fans (whose value, even if they can't afford the work, mustn't be underestimated), for whom online media enables and sustains a highly personal, ongoing dialogue directly with the artist. Even better, there are no opening hours, no middlemen, no doorkeepers, no 'exclusivity', no 'good address'.

The gallery owner saw the value in displaying my name and work on his website but he had no real understanding of how the internet worked beyond what he kept referring to as his 'virtual shop front'. Ironically, the reason he had schlepped out to see me at the enamel factory, in the unfashionable industrial suburbs far from the centre of Sydney, was because he had been impressed by the speed and scale of the spreading awareness of my name and work over the past couple of years. He was entirely resistant to the idea that this had been accomplished almost entirely online.

My encounter with the gallery, from whom, I suspect, I will never hear again, reaffirmed my view that the traditional system (a system to which not all gallery owners belong) is dying.

What I hadn't really understood, until yesterday, was that the galleries still working within that system are determined to take as many artists with them as they can.

The Medium Of The Message

I've always wanted to do a series of prints. In the past, I've been invited to collaborate with print-makers on etchings, silk-screens, and (to my horror) giclée or ink-jet versions of my paintings but I really wanted to do something more original, on my own, and avoid mere replications of my existing works. I also wanted whatever it might turn out to be to resonate with my past.

My early work was influenced by graffiti, sticker tagging, agitprop and propaganda posters from the mid 20th century. Back then, I was interested in the wood block prints produced during China's Cultural Revolution, in which symbolic colours and simplified shapes reinforced short, directive slogans. Ease of printing meant that these were among the most intensively mass-produced, widely distributed art of the pre-web 20th century: the objective was maximum saturation of the imagery and the propagandist ideas represented in it.

Given these influences, the obvious medium for my serial works was stencil. This gave me pause: conventional stenciling is crude and I didn't want to end up with a pastiche of bad street art. I experimented with different methods and materials. I wanted the finish to be beautiful and seductive, referring to ideas in my other hard-edged work. It also had to be durable.

I'm now refining versions of two early ideas – one titled NO!, the other, YES?. Each is hand-stencilled in high gloss enamel on 100% cotton, museum-quality, archival mat board – the stark contrast of shiney paint on flat, unprepared board is stunning – and measures around 40cm high by 60cm wide (15.7" x 23.6").

I'll probably offer five editions of 25 signed, numbered prints each in five different colours: lime green, hot pink, tangerine orange, papal purple and jet black. A sixth, 'artist's proof' edition of just ten signed prints will be in white gloss enamel (still on white mat board). Like agitprop street posters, different versions of the same – or opposite – messages could be hung together. The simple, hand-worked stencil process should make each very affordable.

More than anything, I want the works to appeal to as many people as possible. Like any good propaganda.

Free Of Me

As I've mentioned several times, I want to give as many people as possible an opportunity to own an example of my art. In the past, I've offered an unlimited edition print to download as well as a high numbered, limited edition photograph. This time, I thought I'd give just one person the chance to own an original piece.

This is how it works: Take a look at the pair of Polaroids that illustrated yesterday's blog entry. One of them was used as the study for an enamel painting. But which one? And for what painting?

The answers can be discovered by exploring the images on both this blog and my web site. The first reader to send the correct answers – including the full name of the painting and the URL linking to it – to my studio email, along with their full name and snail mail address, will win a signed, dated, one-off Polaroid 600 study photograph, unmounted, as a prize.

Easy, no?

A Life In Pieces

I sat up until the early hours of this morning, sorting through loose folders filled with more than a decade of hand-written notes and sketches for paintings, and hundreds of Polaroid 600 instant prints I'd kept for years, somewhat carelessly, in a large plastic garbage bag.

Four years ago, I didn't archive my preparatory work or any other papers. I didn't see the point. I'd lost confidence in my painting to such an extent that the evidence of what went into a specific work was of little value to me – nor, as I saw it, to anyone else – and was even somewhat embarrassing. I treated study drawings and photographs with contempt. Whatever I didn't destroy, I stuffed into drawers or files that I was never tempted to open again.

A friend came across the bagful of Polaroids in my old Palm Beach studio – a fibro' beach cottage rented from the actors Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward – just a few months before my Venus In Hell show. From several hundred creased, stained or faded prints, he edited a selection of a dozen which, without my knowledge, he took away to have mounted and framed.

He delivered them back to me, in Melbourne, on the day I hung my show. He insisted they should be exhibited in a small ante-room of the gallery. The price arrived at for each small print was arbitrary, around $A400. By the end of the show, every one of them had been sold.

I've offered very few of them for sale since. They're intensely personal – as a narrative of my conceptual development as an artist, as a sporadic snapshot of my life. Still, the price has more than doubled. Recently, a signed, single image related to a specific painting, mounted in white archival rag, sold for $A1,000 in the secondary market.

I'm learning to hold onto these pieces and not be so quick to dispose of them, either through sales or throwing them in a garbage bin. I now have a formal archive and an assistant who takes care to wrap my stray bits of handiwork, however unloved, defaced or battered, in acid-free paper, then annotate and date them, before storing them on purpose-built shelves.

Maybe, over time, I'll learn to appreciate them. For now, it's enough to know that, somehow, they've survived.

A Little Flight Reading

When I ran away to Japan with my best friend, Michelle, at age 17 – the first time either of us had ever been outside Australia – my bags were filled mostly with books. They were a predictable reflection of mid-teen angst and included The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing, several volumes of poetry by Sylvia Plath, one of which included my then-favourite poem, The Bee Meeting, and an anthology of jisei no ku, Japanese death poems, by poets whose names I can't remember.

I still travel with a lot of books, none of them typical airport fare. 'Dead' hours in airport lounges, in planes, cabs and occasionally trains, or waiting alone in hotel lobbies are precious opportunities to catch up on my reading. Tonight, as I packed for an overnight trip to Melbourne to meet with a prominent collector, I had four paperbacks laid out next to my back-pack:

Idle Worship: How Pop Empowers the Weak, Rewards the Faithful and Succours to the Needy edited by Chris Roberts. It comprises the reflections of various musicians, performers and writers on the weirder phenomena of fan-dom.

Sex, Death and God in L.A. edited David Reid. I love this quote, by screenwriter Jeremy Larner: "To be disturbed by anything is to be a loser."

The Lives of the Dead by poet and Southern gothic novelist, Charlie Smith, who is shamefully unrecognised by an audience beyond the slim readership of the Paris Review.

Oil Notes by Rick Bass. Recommended by a friend who has the best – and widest-ranging – literary taste, it's the journal of a young, itinerant, Texan oil surveyor turned writer who finds all kinds of unexpected relationships between oil prospecting and the everyday dilemmas of life. Of all the books I own, its pages are the most profusely earmarked with tiny post-it tabs.

Scratching The Surface

As hard as it is to get to grips with a new medium, it can be even harder to get to grips with a new idea. I am struggling with both right now.

When I first started working with watercolours, four years ago, I was determined to strike out in a completely different direction from the hard-edged, tightly constructed, Pop-infused images that defined the enamel paintings that had been my enter output for nearly ten years. As I've written before in several other posts, I wanted to puncture the seamless, shiney surfaces of these works and expose the unpretty emotional and psychological mess I'd wanted to entomb beneath them (think Chernobyl and thousands of tons of concrete poured into its nuclear reactor to seal a rupture).

My first marks on paper felt like I was committing some nameless crime and for several days after – and several dozen false starts – it didn't get any easier. The breakthrough came only when a close friend picked up one of many discarded attempts off the floor – one in which I'd deliberately defaced a pair of serpentine female demons with slashes of heavy black paint instead of tearing the paper apart – and said, simply, "Maybe look again at this one. I think it says something." I did and during the two days I spent repairing and reworking it, I came to understand, finally, what I was trying to get at.

It took just four weeks to produce the other dozen works that were exhibited with it at my first-ever exhibition of mixed media works, Venus In Hell, in Melbourne.

I haven't yet had a similar breakthrough with my experiments with pen and ink. Again, my lack of self-confidence and frustration are such that I over-work and destroy nearly every picture. And yet, somewhere in the recesses of my psyche is an imprint of past experience that reminds me that, although the next few days or weeks are likely to be bloody hard and unproductive, something will eventually emerge as the key to unlock the meaning of all the disparate symbols now scattered – like unresolved cyphers – across these pages.

Until then, I have to keep reminding myself not to give up – and resist the impulse to destroy all evidence of my failures.

Process Serving

When I find myself blocked in my own work, I stop and look closely at the creative processes of artists I admire.

A work of art doesn't emerge from the imagination fully formed. It's conceived in rough-hewn fragments, each of which has to be refined, drafted, notated, and revised (and, sometimes, discarded) several times before it becomes apparent just how, where and why it fits in a larger whole.

Picasso's several early studies for his renowned, 25-foot wide oil painting on canvas, Guernica, were barely recognisable as having anything to do with the final work. And yet, as the studies evolved, there was no sense of trepidation or doubt: the great Spanish artist explored as many elements as possible of the ideas they suggested – as if figuring out a puzzle – before committing to the final work.

The German-born, American sculptor, Eva Hesse's process included scribbling instructions and explanatory notes to herself in a small spiral-bound notebook, after sketching only the most basic shapes on graph paper. I used to be criticised for writing rather than sketching at art school but words often helped more, in the initial stages of working out a piece, than pictures. Later, I'd collage, cutting out shapes and parts of study photographs to position and move around before filling in the spaces with pencil drawings.

For more than fifteen years, Edward Weston's Daybooks recorded the American photographer's daily struggle to understand himself and his work. His brief, sometimes clinical entries remind us that process doesn't end when one thing is finished. It's ongoing, relentless, not just through a body of work but also an entire artistic life.

Of course, the viewer sees only the completed work. What it took to get it there is, too often, swept away, lost, and forgotten – except by the artist, who has always to return to the process to develop the next idea, to experiment with new media and techniques and ultimately, to produce more work.

Accepting that – accepting, too, that it's very rarely quick or easy – helps relieve my constant, nagging frustration with myself.

Let It Bleed

When I exhibited my first works in mixed media – pencil, ink, watercolour and acrylic – on paper, three years ago, I was asked why I'd 'suddenly' decided to turn my back on the slick, colorful, high gloss enamel paintings that had proved so appealing to collectors. I hadn't worked out a good answer. All I knew was that, for a long time, I'd wanted to fracture the shiny surface of everything I'd created to that point and expose what was really going on beneath it: a simmering gumbo of long-suppressed frustration, brittle anger and confusion.

It wasn't easy to do. I had to unlearn everything I'd taught myself over the previous decade – all the rigid, highly disciplined processes derived not only from my take on post-modern theories about 'objective', de-personalised art but also an almost neurotic drive to obscure any trace of the human in my work. Then I had to re-learn to think and feel more deeply and at the same time, acquire the confidence not to stifle any stray, instinctive impulses that resulted in marks on the paper that I didn't always expect or understand.

As all this went on, I had to get to grips with the materials themselves. Being someone who is awkwardly obsessive/compulsive, my initial ineptness almost defeated my ambition: my studio floor became a rustling dune of crumpled or torn-up paper as I went through sheet after sheet of expensive, Italian-made, cold-pressed stock. I also went though several tubes of imported English watercolours.

The floor of my studio is again buried under reams of discarded paper. This time, instead of tubes of paint, it's dozens of three-ounce, tin-capped bottles emptied of ink and broken pen nibs. In between regular commutes to the enamel factory, where I spend many hours drawing the finest, straightest, cleanest outlines and painting wide fields of colour which dry with no trace of my repeated brush-strokes, I hunch over my drawing table and try to tame the anarchic, spidery trails and random blots that spill across the paper from my dip pen – without success.

Failure in my art wrenches at me worse than the loss of any lover. But as with a broken heart, all I can do is endure.

Who Said It Was Simple?

"Your silence will not protect you"

– Audre Lorde

It's been the same every time I begin a new series of works on paper. Half-blind, I feel my way around the edges of the dense thicket of ideas I have, trying to make sense of what at first appears to be an impenetrable tangle. To help, I read a lot, both online and off, not for information but for something less specific – an emotional or psychological node that resonates strongly enough to prompt me to start painting.

I've been browsing poems by several black women, including the late Audre Lord. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants who settled in New York in the '30s, she described herself as "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet", and argued powerfully for a feminist movement conscious of both race and class. "I am defined as other in every group I'm part of," she once observed. "The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression."

Who Said It Was Simple

There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.

Coloured Girls

When I was younger, an Indian-Iranian girlfriend told me, "You never paint a coloured girl." I hated to admit it but she was right.

I had my reasons. One was that most of my early works were a deliberate objectification of women and I was reluctant to use anyone other than me as a model. Another was my lack of basic skills when it came to mixing paint.

I only began painting Asian women a few years ago, after a brief lesbian fling – my first, having suppressed my bi-sexuality for too long – with a Korean girl my age. When she undressed, I couldn't help but take in the unfamiliar contrasts between her body and mine, in shape, size and skin colour.

Now I'm drawn to African women, maybe because their often large, strong, powerful bodies more closely resemble those I've always painted – which is to say, my own.

Two women, a Kenyan and an African-American, have asked to model for a few large enamel works I'm creating to benefit arts projects in East and West Africa. I'm looking forward – maybe a little too much – to trying to capture their pronounced curves and musculature, as well as the way their dark skin tones, so subtly different to each other's but also starkly different to mine, absorb light.

More than anything, I want to be able to paint them in the same way they move, as if responding to some insistent rhythm playing only in their heads.

Secret Women's Business

Despite enduring a few of the busiest weeks of my working life so far, I'm only just now getting to grips with the whole concept of 'prioritising'. As a result, I've yet to finalise any of the exhibitions I've planned for 2010. I'm besieged by gallerists, justifiably impatient to nail down dates and contract details.

At least, I'm not worried about the content of the shows. My heart is already set on doing a number of works in mixed media on paper rather than another series of large paintings in enamel.

I've missed the emotional and sensual turbulence of my earliest experiments in watercolours, which I first showed at my Venus In Hell show at MARS Gallery, in Melbourne, three years ago. I want to delve deeper into syncretic Afro-Christian rites but at the same time, explore the complex relationship women can have with the ecstatic spiritual experience – a theme limned in my recent Precious Blood paintings. Within this experience, as within other aspects of female experience, joy and pain are inextricably bound together.

It's ambitious stuff which, I suspect, will make for a rigorous intellectual and creative adventure as I try to resolve disparate ideas and turn them into coherent shows. I can't wait to get rid of everything now on my plate and get started.

Recession Originals

During the three years that I've been writing this blog, I've attempted to give as many people as possible an opportunity to own one of my artworks.

First, there were series of unlimited edition, downloadable, monochrome images that I offered to sign for anyone who printed them out and snail-mailed them to my studio. Then I created a downloadable stencil for street art based on one of my earliest paintings (a pair of Adelaide collectors used it to decorate a room of their house). Most recently, to celebrate my 500th blog entry, I offered a free, limited edition, signed and numbered photographic print to the first 500 readers who emailed me their addresses.

Now I want to give my readers and first-time collectors a chance to acquire one of my original, signed works on paper at a price that's affordable for many even in the midst of this ugly recession.

I've uploaded images of 10 original, signed artworks to Twitpic, along with a description of the media used and dimensions of the image size in both centimetres and inches. These small pieces, most of which are conceptual sketches for larger works or illustrations created specifically for this blog, are offered for sale only occasionally and are usually priced from $US500 to $US900. However, for the next 72 hours only, each is available for just $US275.00, including delivery via Registered International Post.

To acquire one, contact my studio through the email address on my web site, noting the name of the work that you wish to purchase (along with two alternative preferences, if possible). The studio will respond with payment instructions. Sales will be on a strictly 'first come, first served' basis.

A Declaration Of DIY Independence

I figured out early in my life that if I wanted something, I had to make it happen myself.

I was raised in a feminist household. I was given the same freedom as boys my age but I had to shoulder the same responsibilities and be equally strong and capable. In the fairy tales I was read, princesses rescued themselves and didn't aspire to marry the first man who offered them a crystal slipper.

The DIY ethic has always been deeply ingrained in me as an artist. I produced my first, very successful exhibition myself but later, I allowed myself to sucked in to an increasingly archaic and inflexible commercial gallery system. Over time, I became dependent on it, despite a decreasing number of sales.

I lost personal contact with collectors, curators and critics, as well as my reasons for wanting to be an artist. When I complained of this isolation to the gallerist, I was told, "The last thing you want is everyone interested in your work" – as if ubiquity and accessibility were anathema to art. I was offered one, two-week exhibition a year, "subject to availability of space", for which I paid the gallery 50 percent of gross sales as commission, plus expenses. Among the expenses were thousands spent on advertising and promotion in which the gallery featured more prominently than my art.

When the exhibition was over, it was almost impossible for collectors to find out about what I might be working on next, let alone when I might be showing again in the future. The gallery was too busy selling the next artist (who might prove to be a better meal ticket) to be bothered with either unsold inventory or works they had yet to see.

Dealing with institutional or public galleries wasn't – isn't – much better. In their cloistered world, entirely dependent on public funding and big-money private patronage (oh, and gift shop sales), even the best-known living 'fine artists' are discouraged from curating their own work. Large-scale exhibitions materialise despite, not because of, academic prejudices, croneyism and turf wars, and are hide-bound by bureaucratic constraints. So much rides on these institutional shows that they can only pay off if they're hyped as 'events' and living artists are usually a lot less bankable than dead ones.

Now, thanks to the web and a plethora of social network tools, a younger generation of artists has been able to regain control of their work and their careers and nurture a direct, one-on-one relationship with everyone interested in their work. They no longer have to rely on traditional bricks-and-mortar spaces to exhibit and they can use a combination of new and old media to to distribute awareness and understanding of their work. They can also network with artists and entrepreneurs outside their own home towns to create multiple opportunities to collaborate or connect with new audiences.

Even better, they get to keep the lion's share of whatever revenue they generate.

DIY has been embraced as an mainstream ethos, devoid of any taint of dilettantism. A recent edition of the UK newspaper, The Independent describes electro-poet/musician George Pringle as Britain's most exciting new talent. She has set up her own label, through which she is releasing her self-produced debut album. It's available to download on Amazon, Tunecore and 7Digital. "Girls don't challenge themselves enough," she told the newspaper. "It's like being a damsel in distress – waiting for a knight in armour to sweep you up and take you to a recording studio."

The power of the web has forced even the lumbering dinosaurs that are large record companies to concede more creative control and a bigger cut of the action to the artists they want to work with. But small, independent labels have been doing it for years. Tummy Touch Records released a limited edition of just 100 Pilfershire Lane Box Sets, a multimedia work that was also a 'debut album' by musician, Tara Busch. Curated and designed by Busch and collaborator Maf Lewis, it blurs any boundaries between conceptual art, music and self-promotion.

In order to wrest back their freedom from an archaic system, visual artists have to become as innovative, adaptive and willing to experiment as artists in other disciplines. They need to re-think not only how they exhibit their work – and increasingly 'exhibition' sounds as anachronistic as 'videotape' or 'hardback edition' – but also how they can control and increase access to themselves, a key to making their work more coherent, cohesive – and commercially viable.

Commercial is a not a dirty word among artists anymore ( it was always a snotty, 19th century, Romantic prejudice that deserves to be disposed of ruthlessly by 'next generation' artists). After all, true independence requires self-financing. And yeah, that means goodbye gallery advances and government grants.

I've been accused, within the comments of this blog, of 'loving money'. But this criticism doesn't recognise the difference between greed and acquiring the resources needed to be able to do what I want, when and where I want, with my work.

I still use commercial gallery spaces for my own, self-produced events but the income I generate and my self-funded and self-organised logistics and communications – my studio's own mailing list numbers over 7,500 entries and I have personal contact with a couple of hundred collectors – allow me to maintain a high degree of control and creative direction.

By not relinquishing my involvement in the sometimes awkward business side of my art, I have little or no dependence on middle-men. As a result, they have no leverage they can use to constrain or direct me. My increased earnings are invested in the means to create new work and produce future shows. I can afford a small, well-trained crew to ensure that my unmediated (and undliuted) self and my work are distributed as widely as possible. Having something to say is one thing, having someone to see, read or hear it is just as important.

A direct connnection with everyone who's interested in my art, especially interested enough to buy it, is key. Collectors don't just buy the work. They buy into the wider scope of the artist's vision. Their support enables me to create more art and at the same time, encourages me to take more and greater risks, something that commercial gallerists, who rarely have a clear idea about what collectors are really interested in (mainly because galleries are too busy gazing longingly at their wallets to listen closely to them), actively discourage in their artists.

Nevertheless, I am also realistic that many of my collectors are looking for a good return on their investment and so I assume some responsibility for ensuring the value of my work continues to rise.

Having regard for the role money plays in the art is hardly new among artists: Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst have all kept a close eye on the hundreds-of-million dollars their art and 'brands' have generated. And it's not just a 20th or 21st century phenomenon: Michelangelo left a 16th century estate worth many millions in modern-day dollars, which included a palatial villa overlooking Florence: even in his early career, he was infamous for his 'push-it-to-the-limit-and-stick-it-to-em' demands on powerful Church and aristocratic patrons.

Independence costs money – but dependence costs freedom. The first, DIY steps towards independence can be hellishly difficult but this is infinitely more preferable to naïve, self-negating surrender to the mercy of a creaky, unproductive, discouraging and isolating commercial gallery system that is, in its present form, doomed.

Photo above: The painter Francis Bacon's studio at Reese Mews, London, at his death.

Rock 'n' Rolla

The owner of a small, new gallery in rural Victoria was surprised when I agreed to her hesitant suggestion that I might consider her space for a show.

A lot of artists, curators, gallerists and some collectors think there's a pecking order for commercial galleries, according to the artists associated with them, the size and location of the spaces, the credibility and perceived acuity of the management, the money behind them, and so on. They talk of there being the 'right' venues for emerging artists and the 'wrong' ones for artists with established reputations, as if some spaces should be deemed to be 'beneath' a venerable 'name' or acknowledged money-maker.

I think of galleries the same way a rock 'n' roll band thinks of venues: there are good and bad ones, there are ones that have a bit of history or a better weekday crowd, but you pretty much play them all when you're on the road. And as long as the crowd gets into what you're playing, a cramped, smokey chicken-wire bar at a truck-stop in the middle of nowhere can be as much fun as a slick 'big room' or a swanky theatre in the heart of a city.

Punk and No Wave bands in the 70s and 80s and grunge bands in the '90s used to eschew large capacity venues for the club circuit. Even stadium gods like the Stones have been known to warm up their aging chops in small, local dives before heading out on their million-dollar, multi-national tours.

Of course, late 20th and 21st century artists have long been encouraged (by gallerists, mostly) to think of exhibitions as being more occasional, elitist and, well, reverent than a music gig. It's a residue of a 19th century Romantic notion about so-called fine art that I just can't stomach. So, next year, I am planning a series of shows around the world that will open within a few weeks of each other, each featuring different works, in different media, in very different types of venues, from small, single rooms in major cities and rural towns to rambling, museum-like, multi-room spaces in suburbia.

I'm also doing a few talks and 'one-night-stands' at universities and artist-run spaces.

At it's simplest, it's an experiment. I can exhibit new work and at the same time, meet some of the people who have found their way to me through my various virtual spaces online – just as they have to a new generation of young musicians, film-makers and performers. I can also test the idea that, in this post-Web 2.0 age in which concepts of 'ownership' are increasingly tenuous, there's been a radical shift in the locus of real value in the arts – a value no longer determined by scarcity but by ubiquity – from the art work (the 'product') to the artist (or 'producer').

When it's over, I'll follow the routine of road-weary musicians and return to the studio to compose new works. Who knows? Once I have a new 'set', I might take it 'on tour' again.

Turning Japanese

As soon as I finished high school, I booked a one-way ticket to London via Japan. I was seventeen. I went with my best friend. Tokyo and Osaka were our first experiences of a world outside Australia.

We were guests of a Japanese family who were keen to show us as much as we could digest of Japanese culture. It soon became apparent that they also liked to be seen with us. We resembled a pair of ill-matched manga action figures come to life. My angular, six-foot-tall frame and severe, high-cheek-boned face reflected a fetishistic Japanese ideal of a Caucasian warrior woman – without the wavey blonde hair and pneumatic tits. All I needed was a sword. My friend was the petulant but pretty schoolgirl, a paedo-sexual fantasy, right down to the huge doe eyes, long eye lashes, small nose, full lips and pert but ample-chested body.

Even then, I had an interest in erotica. It pervades Japanese popular culture and doesn't refrain from the fleshy, forensically intricate display of every sort of weird sex – and not just between humans. I bought paperback books of photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki from Aoyama Book Store and pored over his saturated colour 35mm and Polaroid close-ups of rope-bound young women (an example above) and hairless vaginas penetrated by fish, plastic dinosaurs and tiny Japanese cocks, and replicated by orchids, as well as his monochrome snapshots of the inside of Shinjuku 'soap lands' and 'love hotels'.

I hadn't expected so-called 'high art' to be exhibited in department stores, as if it was just part of an enhanced shopping experience. Years later, the Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, reminded me of this when he wrote, "Perhaps the beginning of the 21st century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping." In Tokyo, the boundaries that separated so-called 'high culture' from everything else didn't exist. Every form of visual art was everywhere.

So was sex. Every Japanese read manga and grey-suited, inscrutable salariman sat on rush-hour commuter trains unembarassedly absorbed in hentai cartoon panels filled with uncensored, hardcore (and often sadistic) sex and gore-laden violence.

Manga's most popular characters were also sold as action figures and rendered on every imaginable type of merchandise, from t-shirts to tiny vibrators. Many young Japanese, especially geek-ish otaku fan-boys, collected these with a connoisseurship that matched a professional curator's.

These days, Japanese artists have global recognition. But they still appear intent on blurring the boundaries between commerce, entertainment and art. Takashi Murakami operates a slicker, more sober and commercial version of Warhols 'factory, with scores of young artist apprentices and protegées. He oversees the production of work ranging from cartoony 'Shock Pop' (a term he invented) paintings and resin statues to anime films, home wallpapers, rugs – as featured on Murakami's factory website, Kaikai Kiki – and collaborations with the designer Marc Jacobs and the French fashion house, Louis Vouitton. In Japan, Murakami's colourful, Vuitton-branded fashion accessories are also exhibited as artworks.

Another Japanese artist, Yoshimoto Nara, also reproduces his original art, which has an international cult following, on merchandise, including ashtrays, clocks, drinking glasses, postcards, and the covers of diaries. This sort of productisation would cause disdain if done in the Western world by a Western artist, especially if they weren't sold in galleries as an attempt to legitimize them. Nara's products are available to the mass market through the boutique toy shop Sweaty Frog, Kaboodle, and even Amazon.

Tomoaki 'Nigo' Nagao doesn't call himself an artist but he acts like one – well, a peculiarly Japanese, mutant version, a gene-splice of Jeff Koons, Malcolm McLaren and the Beastie Boys. He began designing limited edition clothing under the label A Bathing Ape In Lukewarm Water, shortened to BAPE, but has expanded the brand to include BAPE Cuts hair salon, BAPE Sounds records (for which he is producer/director) and BAPE Café and Gallery. Each is independently successful, and enhanced – rather than diminished – by an increasingly distributed and popular brand.

I've often been criticised within Australia for my non-traditional approach to both to my work and career, especially my insistence on serial (albeit handmade) paintings and my talk of the 'productisation' not only of my art but myself. Unarguably, I'm influenced by – and supportive of – the attempt by Japanese artists to redefine the purpose and meaning of art and to a large extent, democratise it.

I'm unconvinced that their motivation is really about art as much as it is about cashing in. So I've been very careful to ensure that in my case, the art comes first and that its 'productisation' is recognisable as part of a broader conceptual approach. Then again, maybe I'm just clinging to a threadbare, Romantic notion of art within an increasingly creaky Western context. Australian curators have already consigned me to a box marked 'post-Murakami, manga-influenced', regarding me as a local artist with little connection to any identifiable Australian tradition.

In 2007, my work featured in a show titled BLAST! The Influence of Manga and Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture on Australian Artists that toured regional public art galleries in Queensland. For the first time I realised that my art did belong somewhere – just not in Australia.

No Place Like Home

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.

– Robert Frost, The Death Of The Hired Man

I've travelled a lot for my art. As an Australian-born British citizen, I can travel and work as I please throughout the United Kingdom and most of Europe, as well as Australia and New Zealand. I am welcomed without too much hassle at the borders of India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, China and Japan.

I have also an Australian passport but I don't think of myself as an Australian. The artists who've influenced me most have been European or North American and none of my work echoes, even faintly, an Australian tradition (not even my paintings from Lake Eyre). I feel less of an outsider in London than I do anywhere in Australia.

My boyfriend used to tease me for masculinising my posture and broadening my vowels – pretending, somehow, to be more Australian – in order 'to fit in'. It was something I learnt to do growing up in small, patriarchal rural towns. I adopted it as a survival tactic when I was included with nine middle-aged male artists on a testosterone-amped art expedition to Lake Eyre, in the Australian outback, when I was in my early twenties.

I think I'll fit in just fine in North America. I have no history there, no close friends, no family ties and since the 2001 Patriot Act, no civil rights. But it's where I've wanted to explore most my whole life. Thanks to the 'net, I've discovered that, in a way that's almost visceral rather than intellectual, Americans 'get' the populist, mythomanic entertainment and advertising references and post-feminist sexual politics of of my enamel painting. They're also open to my much rawer and experimental watercolours and drawings.

Yes, I'll be a foreigner, with less rights than I might have even in Thailand or Cambodia. But wherever I end up, it will feel more like home than here.

Weekend Retreat

At the end of a long week, everything begins to slow in the studio. The work pace decelerates, the noise level abates. The clock takes an age to complete an hour. Conversations are longer and more personal. The phone stops ringing.

I look forward to each weekend not as an opportunity to rest but rather to work on new ideas without distraction. I buy good food. I open up the windows through the house to allow the ionized sea air to circulate through every room. I program my iTunes to play my favorite music at random. And then I draw. If I'm not too tired, I might remained focussed on a particular work for twelve hours or more.

I remember the pleasant, productive solitude that first drew me to a life as an artist.

King Ink

I want to draw in ink again.

A few years ago, I used gel pens and simple, pared down outlines on white archival board to create the first studies of my 2004 enamel series, Self vs Self. I chose gel pens because of the uneven mix of colour particles suspended in the sticky fluid. I traced over the top of them with a glitter pen. The tiny, silvery fragments were barely noticeable but they reflected and enhanced the colour variations.

Recently, I came across a beautiful, traditional, US-manufactured ink with brighter but subtler variations of colour than the gel pens. The magenta is a rich purple that transforms itself into crimson then bright pink at the crisp edge of a line. There's also a rich, venous red, the same colour as my blood; it dries as dark as coagulated trace evidence.

The colour shifts in the inks replicate what I've been trying to achieve with watercolours, except that ink is more precise, even when I draw fast and messy. I bought some old fashioned dip pens so I can splatter the ink a little and experiment with different nib shapes and thicknesses.

I'll exhibit some ink on paper works as well as watercolours for my planned exhibition in Toronto. I want the drawings to be stark, uncluttered but sensuous depictions of arcane rites and sexual practices.

Artists returning to simpler, more traditional media is something of a trend right now. Damien Hirst eschewed assistants to go all brooding, neo-Expressionist in paintings he unveiled earlier this year in Moscow. Brit Art's It Girl, Tracey Emin – who vies for the title with Jay Jopling's ex-missus, Sam Taylor-Wood – recently exhibited pen and ink drawings. They're execrable: scratchy, laboured linework barely concealing a wobbly hand, with figures flattened so clumsily they resembled road-kill, all life (and sex) squashed out of them.

The medium deserves better.

The Business Of Being Myself

The worst days are not those in which I have a lot to do. The worst days are those in which I have a lot to do and I'm totally ill-prepared.

It has taken me a long time to get to grips with the demands of a successful artistic career. It's not just the constant output of my studio – after two years, I'm only now refining a process that enables me to cope with a large number of commissioned works or works committed to shows and still have time to develop new ideas and experiment with other media – but also the responsibility of managing myself without too many intermediaries.

At any given time, there are logistics – production schedules, shipping, customs, publicity, and so on – to plan for shows in two or more countries. There are private sales to be negotiated and works consigned. There is a constant flow of other commercial enquiries that might range from a fashion company seeking to license one of my images to a publisher wanting me to contribute a few words or an essay to an upcoming book.

And there are the regular updates of words and pictures – small drawings, watercolours and photographs I create every day – to this blog, along with scores of one- and two-liners to Twitter, all of which keep me closely connected to those most interested in my work.

There was (and maybe still is) a part of me that didn't really believe that I'd 'make it' as an artist. So, for a long time, even when my work began to sell well, I paid scant attention to the lessons other tried to teach me about how to get a handle on the growing number of things that had to be done in a working day.

I ignored the simple utility of making daily 'to do' and call lists and sharing a weekly schedule with everyone who worked for or with me. I resented the hours I had to spend overseeing my improving finances – which led to more than one tense conversation with the tax department and several hair-tearing reprimands from my accountant – or reviewing contracts and business correspondence.

I'm more realistic now. I recognise that if I'm to be truly independent and self-determining as an artist, I have to adapt the intelligence, imagination and discipline that are elemental to my art to taking care of the business my art has created.

If I don't, then my art – and my life – will end up, once again, being controlled and exploited by others.

The 'Enamel Factory', Western Suburbs

The Small Studio, Northern Beaches

I Is Another

As a kid, my earliest paintings scared me. I destroyed most of them without showing anyone. They were dark, angry and self-negating. I never signed them.

In my late teens, my work was pretty and cute. It came across as emotionally vacant. There was still a lot of anger in it but it lay hidden beneath the brittle, candy-coloured surfaces. I signed them with a symbol, a fused HD, like a cattle brand, painted in an obscure position. I didn't like the way it looked but I used it anyway. I told people it was a response to my early readings on semiotics.

But that was bullshit. I used it because it obscured my identity. It was something of an in-joke among my family that the first person I should show my art to was a psychiatrist. I worried that everybody would be able to see who I really was through my work – or who I wasn't. I wanted to remain hidden from view.

A couple of years later, I began branding my work as HAZED. My father suggested that if I didn't want to sign by hand, I should use a large, custom-made, rubber stamp instead. I liked this impersonal, almost industrial attitude to works that, even then, I preferred to talk about as product rather than as art.

A gallerist suggested I stamp my work with DOONEY. Using my name as a brand for an art object appealed to me and meshed with my increasing desire to exert what I thought of as a Karl Lagerfeld-like level of control over every aspect of my art and self. I even signed my studies on paper in neat block letters practised during architectural drafting classes. My own hand betrayed little trace of me.

I still stamp my enamel paintings with DOONEY, usually at the side of the timber frame. It fits with my enduring desire for control and with the slick, couture-like appeal of the 'productised' works themselves.

In contrast, I sign my name in full, in a sweeping cursive script, on my much more unruly, self-expressive drawings and watercolours. To these, I've also begun adding other words – from poems written by others to fragments of my own diaries and letters – in the same handwriting. I sometimes erase or blur these words but only so they become a background texture.

I don't want to hide myself anymore.

Hanging By A Thread

If I needed a kick up the ass to remind me that I was slipping into crusty, suburban complacency, I got it yesterday.

A corporate high-flyer who had commissioned two large enamel paintings informed me that he was able to pay neither the balance owing on one that I had just completed nor a second stage payment on the other, for which I had presented the study drawing. This left me with a five-figure shortfall in my studio's monthly budget.

After several emails to art dealers in three countries (well, those whom I still regard as friends), as well as a couple of tense, late night and early morning conference calls between the collector, my accountant and me, some of the monies owed were recovered and the finished painting re-sold.

It's the first financial fright of any magnitude that I've ever had to negotiate and the experience left me feeling like a wrung-out dish-rag for the rest of the day.

Last year, my work suffered because of some serious technical fuck-ups. So I immersed myself in creating a better managed, more highly skilled and productive studio in which I could be confident not only of the quality of the 'craftsmanship' but also the capacity to turn whatever I might imagine in the future – in any number of different media – into reality.

For a brief moment, everything I'd worked so hard for was threatened by this one, unexpected default. I'm determined not to let that happen again.

Unchained Art

For the past year or so, I've found it hard to drum up any enthusiasm for exhibiting. Conversations with commercial galleries have sputtered then stalled as I lost interest in the finer details of contract points and unpalatable compromises. Half-hearted searches for spaces I might hire and refit for a self-produced show were quickly distracted by, say, lunch at a beachside café.

I've been quite happy to work through a backlog of commissioned pieces. In between, I've let my intellect and imagination lie fallow, avoiding anything that looked like a challenge to which I might have to rise. I still sketched and made photographs every day but as a discipline more than anything else, a means of keeping my 'hand in'.

Then, about a month ago, I recognised that it wasn't exhibiting that I was trying to avoid but rather exhibiting here.

I have never been an artist whose life or work has been deeply rooted in a place. Over the past few years, I've operated most often in an non-specific, highly distributed virtual space and managed simultaneous dialogues with multiple connections every day. I've become so detached from a localised idea of a 'real' world that now any attempt to define my identity as an artist in Australia feels, suddenly, ludicrous.

I wasn't sure what do about this until the virtual came to my rescue. Within just a couple of weeks, I received a handful of offers to exhibit, perform and speak in different parts of the USA and Japan. Suddenly, the urge to begin working again – really working: delving into new ideas, synthesizing or reforming old ones, making stuff – returned, along with a desire to reconnect on some visceral level with people as I share my art with them.

Maybe because of too many personal disconnections and bad memories, I don't feel like I can do this in Australia – not now, anyway. So, come the end of the year, I am going first to North America, then maybe Africa, on the first leg of what might well become a long, drawn-out journey. Like the character in Paul Bowles' 1949 novel, A Sheltering Sky, I don't think of myself as a tourist: I am a traveller.

"The difference is partly one of time... whereas the tourist generally hurries home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he felt most at home."

Later, Bowles writes, "another important difference between tourist and traveller is that the former accepts his own civilisation without question; not so the traveller, who compares it with the others. and rejects the elements he finds not to his liking."

Sotheby's Sale Update

Despite a damaged surface, one of my early paintings, Ultra Violet One, sold for $7,800, plus GST, at Sotheby's sale of Important Australian Art in Melbourne, tonight. This was just under Sotheby's generous pre-sale estimate of between $A8,000 and $A12,000, which might have been achieved had the painting been in flawless condition.

In any case, tonight's price was over six times what was originally paid for the work at my first commercial gallery show, eleven years ago.

Art Broken

Whenever I sell one of my large enamel paintings, I provide instructions on how the work should be cared for. I sometimes attach a short note with my invoice. The information is basic, uncomplicated and requires very little of the buyer.

With minimal attention, it's easy to keep my work in bright, pristine condition for decades and I am always available to collectors to give further advice or in some instances, effect small repairs.

Occasionally, paintings of mine turn up in the secondary market looking less than a hundred percent. Art is often bought for love but it is also a significant asset, an investment. Given the value of my paintings, these days, I'm shocked that people don't take better care of them. Then again, reading the condition reports of other artists' work at various auctions, even of important, very valuable pieces, I've noted tears, scuffing, scratches and lots of other avoidable damage, so it's a common problem.

The first owner of one of my favourite paintings, Dolores Haze, who is a serious collector, had a custom-built crate to transport it during the time it was in his collection. Despite having travelled all over the world with it for over eight years, the picture remained in exactly the same condition as the day it left my studio – until it was sold to make room for more works of mine.

I saw it not long after, on the web site of a Melbourne gallery, and enquired about buying it for myself. The gallery sent photographs that revealed a long scrape across the surface: a lighter layer of base paint was visible. I always paint from two to five coats of each colour, so the scrape must have been deep. When I raised this with the gallery, I was told that the "imperfection" was my fault – that lighter paint had mysteriously "risen to the surface" of the work: technically impossible with industrial enamels and totally at odds with the experience of the first owner.

Today, I looked at Sotheby's online catalogue for the forthcoming sale in Melbourne of Important Australian Art. When I enlarged the photograph of my painting, I noticed several small marks on the surface. I had to subscribe (giving all my personal details) to be able to read the condition report, which stated: "There are three stable hair-line cracks (upper right). There is some scuffing to the painting surface (centre left and lower left) and similar scuffing (centre right). There are two minor spots of paint loss on the left and right edges on the underside of the corners of the canvas. The work is otherwise in good stable condition."

I am happy to be consulted regarding damage to my early works. In many cases, I will undertake whatever is required to bring them back up to scratch (so to speak) myself. The investment is miniscule compared to the value of the work. My only concern is that my work is maintained. Besides, I believe collectors should be able to re-sell one of my works for a profit (you can read my view on droit de suite here).

I have called and emailed Sotheby's, offering to repair Ultra Violet One after it has been bought. I've suggested they let interested collectors know of this when the lot comes up at auction.

A Point Of No Return?

Sometimes, when I'm tired and depressed, I wonder if I'd be happier working in a nine-to-five McJob, with a meagre pay cheque and a dull but predictable routine.

I had just such a job, five years ago, before I regained my confidence – and my career – as an artist. I loathed it. But at least I had time to hang out with friends at weekends, go to movies or the local pub, and along with most suburban Australians, enjoy four weeks of paid Summer holidays a year. Who knows? If it had gone on much longer, maybe I might have married, settled down and had a child.

I made a choice in my late teens to pursue my ambition – to paint, every day, and to be a working artist – instead of partying hard or taking off to Bali. I moved wherever I thought I needed to be, even if I couldn't really afford to, in order to better educate myself and develop opportunities for myself to exhibit and be around other artists. This often meant leaving behind family, friends or lovers. I didn't want to live with anyone and I didn't long for a home, just a studio with a bed in it.

My life was – and still is – narrowly focussed, uncompromising, maybe even selfish. As I approach middle-age, it isn't yet everything I've ever dreamed of but it's getting there. I make a good living from my art. I have the means to travel and live where I want. I have the freedom to explore the outermost reaches of both my imagined and real worlds. I'm beholden to very few. Best of all, I can be myself.

I remind myself every day not to take any of this for granted.

Mindful Of Myself

The doctor reviewed the results of my blood tests and chest x-ray with me today. Apart from lacking vitamin D because I spend too little time in the sun, I'm in perfect health. The persistent symptoms I've been experiencing – nausea, headaches, rashes – have nothing to do with my body. They're to do with my mind.

The news was disturbing and difficult to accept, at first – like I had tricked myself (which, I guess, I had). But it's a happy result. The dosage for the mood stabiliser I take every morning is being increased and I'll have to become much more disciplined about regular exercise, good nutrition and a more coherent structure to my working life.

This afternoon, I swam laps in the tidal pool at my local beach. I wanted to establish a new routine right away. I could see my home from the pool; camouflaged by scrub atop an imposing headland nearby, it looked small and precarious on the edge of the sheer, sandstone cliff. It felt good to be in the sun and cold, salty water alone.

I used to think that changes take a long time, that new beginnings are hard. But they're not. All that's needed is a commitment to immediate action – and a little courage.

Briefly, On My Birthday

My birthday was, by choice, low key. I took the phone off the hook, logged off my computer and stayed in bed to catch up on a few weeks of lost sleep. It was the best gift I could have wished for.

There were other gifts, not least a bottle of a hot, 'Dooney' pink ink called Shah's Rose with which I am going to write everything, even my cheques, from now on.

I have mixed feelings about birthdays, especially as I get older. I don't have any hang-ups about my fading youth (although my fading good looks might be another matter). Rather, as each year passes, I become more acutely aware of how much I've taken time for granted – and how many precious opportunities I've let slip through my fingers, often without even appreciating them.

I'm not going to waste a minute of the rest of my life.

Tie Me Down (For Next Year)

I was determined to start the new week in a better, more productive place than I have been for a few months.

I got up early to put the finishing touches on a new enamel-on-board work, All Tied Up!, another in my occasional series of Cowboy Babes, before driving to my 'enamel factory' in the far west of Sydney for another hard day in its toxic environment.

This weekend, I confirmed dates for two very different exhibitions – a new series of watercolours in Toronto, the last nine of my large, enamel Dangerous Career Babes on Staten Island, in New York – as well as followed up leads for other spaces in British Columbia, California and Texas.

I want to end up on a sort of rock 'n' roll art tour of North America in the first half of 2010.

It's been over two years since I last exhibited paintings. For my 2008 show, PORNO, I was more curator and model than I was artist, intent on exploring a simple idea I had about the degree to which we've been seduced by contemporary social media to expose ourselves – in every sense – through photography.

This time, the ideas and the works themselves will be more rigorous – testing, with the Dangerous Career Babes, the coherence of several paintings as a single conceptual piece and with the watercolours, trying to expand the language and content of a medium that's so often seen as somewhat hidebound and unfashionable.

Remembering To Breathe

Last Friday, after driving to a neighbouring village for a chest x-ray, I thought about spending the rest of the morning at the gym. Instead, I drove home.

I always take the less direct route, off the main road, so I can look out across alternating views of both sides of the peninsula: calm, sheltered bays on one side, a broad expanse of open ocean, uninterrupted all the way to the coast of Chile, on the other.

I glimpsed a score of sleek, black shapes dart behind the break line of the surf, close inshore. At first I thought they were surfers but it was a pod of dolphins. Their bodies arced slowly across the glassy swell as they browsed the sandy-bottomed shallows for food.

At home, I decided to make small, simple moss gardens in three cheap ceramic pots for my studio, a zen task that immediately set my mind at peace. I scraped three kinds of moss off various parts of my driveway – I'd noticed how pretty they were just before I slipped on some and fell – then lay them in mounds atop soil and rock in each pot. I sat the pots on a timber fence that divides my yard from the ocean to spray them with a fine mist of fresh water.

Afterwards, I crawled through the same fence to sit on the very edge of the steep ocean cliff. The sun warmed my back as I stared out across the deep, dark blue water to an empty horizon. I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythm of the churning white surf a hundred feet or more below my feet.

It's rare that I do this. Mostly, when I come home, I head straight inside, anxious to get to work. Always trapped in – and by – my imagination, I forget that I chose to life here for a reason. When I remember to stop and look, it really does make me happy.

My Way, The Hard Way

My focus is splintered today. I'm reviewing contract points for exhibitions in the US, Canada and Japan next year. I'm working out production and delivery schedules for half a dozen large enamel paintings (the 'factory' is living up to its nickname). And I'm trying to refine a study for a new commission.

In between all this, I'm barely coping with conflicting emotional responses to my ebbing physical and mental health. The results of a battery of tests I did yesterday to assess the impact of my over-exposure to enamel will be available early next week. I'm also managing adjustments in the dosages of new medications prescribed to stabilise my bi-polar disorder, a process always fraught with unpredictable side-effects and unclear benefits.

I resist the urge to curl up in my bed and feel sorry for myself. Instead, I drive myself harder, filtering out the background clutter so I can concentrate on – and complete – one task after another.

A persistent flaw in my work process (besides a tendency to rapid mood shifts) is my frustrating inability to multi-task. Organisation, a well-defined structure and a minimum of improvisation and distraction are key to my getting anything done.

Art Might Be The Death of Me

Over the past few years, I've noticed my sensitivity to the chemicals in many types of paint has become so acute that even a faint whiff of nail polish can make me feel queasy. My reaction to enamel's carcinogenic fumes is more extreme but somehow I've grown used to the idea that nausea, a sore throat, blistered, itchy skin, blurred vision and nose-bleeds are all part of a day's work for me.

Yesterday, my boyfriend dragged me to a local doctor. I'd been vomiting and feeling like death for 24 hours following a long stint at what I call 'the enamel factory', in Sydney's western suburbs, where I've been spending an increasing number of days (and nights) putting the finishing touches to the last of my commissioned Dangerous Career Babes.

The doctor's demeanour as he peered into my ears, nose and throat and listened to the faint wheeze in my lungs was a grim reality check: "It's simple," he said. "You have to stop using enamel immediately. The risk of cancer is very high." He drew four vials of blood from my arm and organised for me to have a series of x-rays and a respiration assessment done.

I'm unlikely to stop using the medium any time soon. I still have at least a dozen large paintings I want to complete. But once they're done, I'll immerse myself in other, less toxic media for a while. It might be interesting to delve again – as I did to some extent in my Venus In Hell watercolours, three years ago – into what lies beneath the brittle, shiny, candy-coloured surface of my my enamel works.

Sotheby's Preview

The Sydney preview of works included in Sotheby's sale of Important Australian Art opened at the auction house's local headquarters at 118-122 Queen Street, Woollahra (Tel. 02 9362 1000) yesterday and will continue through Sunday, 16th August. A Melbourne preview will open on 20th August at 926 High Street, Armidale (Tel. 02 9509 2900) and close on Monday, 24th August, the day of the sale. Both the Sydney and Melbourne galleries will be open from 11am to 5pm daily.

Another of my early paintings, Ultra Violet One, a 1.50m x 1.0m, enamel on canvas first sold at an eponymous solo exhibition in Brisbane, in 1998, is being offered by a Sydney-base private collector. Sotheby's estimate of between $A8,000 and $A12,000 is realistic if somewhat dwarfed by the high six figures expected for works by elders such as Jeffrey Smart and Sidney Nolan.

Writer's Block

I try to update entries to this blog at least every couple of days, if not more regularly, but sometimes the concise documenting of my activities and thoughts is thwarted by the messy reality of my mind.

It goes blank.

It doesn't happen often. I don't believe in waiting for inspiration to come out of nowhere. On most days, I draw, paint, scribble in diaries and take photographs to make sure I'm always alert to the stray thought, the peripheral observation, that might lead me to my next work. It's a discipline I try to maintain even when I'm tired or depressed. It has enabled me not just to produce a lot of work but also refine and articulate the ideas within it.

The pace of my life and productivity has accelerated in recent months. At times, I've struggled to keep up. I have days when the weariness is bone-deep and the physical toll of the medium I use is marked. Sometimes my mind just shuts down and I can't think of even the simplest things, let alone construct a coherent sentence. When that happens, I just hope regular readers will understand.

My Law And Disorder

I'm not a disciplined person. Having bipolar affective disorder doesn't help but I suspect that even if I didn't have it, I'd still find any kind of predictable routine or structure uncomfortable or confining.

In order to be as successful as I have been, I've had to resign myself to a relentless internal conflict. I impose on myself an unforgiving regimen that ensures a reasonable amount of work gets done (and not just in the studio) every week. At the same time, I struggle to resist the fast shifts of mood, stray impulses and occasional surrender to lethargy that conspire to erode it.

Most days, I achieve a precarious but productive balance. Some days I don't. Then, nothing at all gets done. When I fuck up, there are always plenty of good excuses. But I've learnt that cutting myself even a little slack makes it harder, not easier.

Saving My Self

Five years ago, after a well-received but poorly attended show in a Melbourne gallery, I retreated far from art and stopped painting completely. Instead, I worked in a shoe shop. I still called myself an artist but there was a part of me that had come to terms with the idea that maybe I wasn't.

A box of English watercolour paints changed that. At the end of each day, after I returned from work (to the small room in my father's house where I was living), I would sit on my bed, open the box, and lose myself in experiments with unlikely textures, colours and ideas. I would also make one tiny painting that I would send the next morning to a new boyfriend. He received hundreds over the next few months, each completely different.

These paintings saved my life. I ignored pressure from the galleries then representing my work to return to the large enamels they identified as 'typically Dooney'. But eventually I gave up my job at the shoe shop and committed once again to the idea of myself as an artist. My 'come-back' exhibition, my first in two years, was titled Venus In Hell and comprised fifteen torrid watercolours inspired by Voodoo rituals and beliefs.

I still do the small watercolours every day for the same boyfriend and for this blog. I have sold some to first-time collectors for whom my larger works are out of reach – the works on scraps of Italian cold-pressed paper range in price from $US400 to $900 – but they're unlikely ever to be exhibited. Of all my art, they are the most intimate and telling. The white walls of a gallery are entirely the wrong way to share them.

A Dream Of Open Spaces

I've been thinking a lot about how I want to exhibit my work in the future.

I don't enter into representation deals anymore. When I do exhibit in a commercial gallery, it's a one-off arrangement, usually negotiated on the basis that the gallery recognises my shows draw a big crowd and generate press. I don't ask much of the gallery other than a freshly painted space. I underwrite a lot of the costs (such as advertising, direct mail, and catering) myself.

You might hear that the success of one or other of my shows owed a lot to the organisation efforts of the gallery but it's never true. In Australia, the same, small team manages every aspect of my shows, from the design and photography of the posters and the writing of the press releases to the transport of the works, the hanging and the logistics associated with the opening night party.

There are some very skilled gallerists elsewhere – in China, Japan and maybe the USA – and I look forward to working with them in the next year and a half. In the meantime, however, I'm trying to figure out how to present my art beyond the virtual spaces I've refined over the past four years. I want to give as many people a chance to experience it in the real world and make the experience engaging, provocative and maybe even memorable.

I hate the colourless, antiseptic, and whisper-silent spaces of galleries and modern art museums, which leach away the unruly, visceral experience of art and reduce it to something as clinical as the bloodless corpses medical students use to study anatomy. But there's no point bitching about it if I'm not prepared to put my money where my mouth is and do something different – and better.

The Art Of Selling (Out)

A couple of years ago, I agreed to adapt half a dozen of my best known images, the Cowboy Babes, as designs for the retro-looking tin boxes of a condom manufacturer, Legends Rubbers. Unfortunately, just before the first tin could be manufactured, the company hit a bump in its business plan and it was no longer able to support the promotion in the way we'd envisioned. I withdrew from the deal.

Since then, I've been approached by other companies wanting to adapt my art to other, more commercial media: a clothing company in Eastern Europe, a mobile wireless re-seller in Sydney, even a department store in Singapore.

However, I've learnt that there's a big gap between what's proposed in an initial, enthusiastic email and what turns up in a draft heads of agreement – and that's if the discussion gets that far. Of the dozen or so approaches I've had in the past three years, not one has amounted to anything more than lots of entertaining but ultimately frustrating talk.

But I'm wising up. In the next month or so, I'm going to hire a professional to handle such enquiries. That way I can remain undistracted from the very thing that attracted these 'opportunities' in the first place: my art.

Relentless

I was still in the studio at 3.30 a.m., last night, the tail-end of a long, 20-hour day.

There were small corrections, refinements and 'clean-ups' to be made to two Dangerous Career Babes that were scheduled to be packed and delivered to a collector in Melbourne, this morning. Another two, also for collectors in Melbourne, were completed and moved to drying racks to harden while arrangements are being made for their delivery next week. Four more large enamels, in various stages of completion – these bound for collectors in South and Western Australia – are hung on the studio wall, awaiting my attention later today.

I'm utterly exhausted. When I am not at the 'enamel factory, a two-hour drive from home, there are a backlog of collector enquiries to attend to at my other studio, correspondence to review with venues in Asia and Europe and PR to plan ahead of a couple of major auctions scheduled for next month and September. More than anything, I am longing for a few, quiet, un-pressured weeks to develop ideas for completely new work and experiment with new media. I also want to get away from Australia.

As I wind down my two-year commitment to the Dangerous Career Babes, I'm looking forward to not poisoning myself every day with enamels. I'll continue to work in the medium – next, in the small Precious Blood series – but not with the same intensity or level of exposure.

User Unfriendly

A handful of unpleasant or uncomfortable encounters – some in the 'real world', some virtual – have put me off having too much to do with people, at least for the time being. I know I'm not particularly 'user-friendly' but I'm unfailingly restrained and polite when dealing with strangers. This posture is usually reciprocated. But there are those who take advantage of random encounters to patronise, insult or inflict puerile crudeness.

They usually argue that my art or my written words are some kind of provocation.

There's not much I can do about it except ignore them. On Twitter, I don't hesitate to block anyone who comes across as an arsehole. I'm a little easier here: I won't tolerate gratuitous insults (even between commenters) but strong criticism or dispute is likely to be published as long as it's not anonymous. Just don't expect me to respond.

Tough It Up

When I was a kid, I was reckless with my body. I threw it around, tumbled off or over things, scraped my skin, stayed up too long without sleep and fell down from exhaustion. It made me feel alive and exorcised some of the pent-up energy within me that always threatened to combust.

When I grew up, I became more conscious of the idea that I was supposed to 'look after myself'. Which really meant 'preserve my youth' or, rather, the youthful physical attributes others considered desirable. Bloodied scratches and scars were no longer trophies of risk or achievement but blemishes. They had to be covered up or 'treated'. Sport and exercise weren't about fun or endurance or exhilaration but whittling away fat deposits, toning the body.

Then there were the admonitions that I 'shouldn't wear myself out'. I was urged – by friends, by TV advertising, by magazine columnists – to sleep more, not because I needed it but because it would reduce 'visible signs of aging'.

We all have to work hard to achieve anything. And yet women are constantly told – and tell themselves – that they shouldn't. I'm happiest when going hell for leather. I feel strong and confident when I get up straight after a fall. I don't like being fussed over. I don't need time – physically or emotionally – to 'heal' or 'get myself together'.

I like pushing myself and what I achieve when I do gives me a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that nothing else does. I've trained my body to urge itself on, even when my mind is telling me I'm weak, I should rest or worse, retreat,.

I don't want to live less just because I'm trying to preserve the vessel I live in.

Oh, And It's ArtFriday

The blog, New Curator, which is an informative source of news and commentary about Britain's art museums, has featured my work in its regular ArtFriday update. I admit I blushed when I read the introduction:

"Normally, selecting an artist is an easy process or browsing through my social network connections and offering a bit of my own personal interpretation. I don’t pretend to have that curatorial disconnection. I select artists because I love their work. I’m trusting my tastes and asking you to trust in my tastes for the awesome.

"The problem for this week’s ArtFriday is that it’s Hazel Dooney.

"I am a massive gushing Hazel Dooney fanboy."

No Talk Of Good Old Days

Ten years ago, one of my lecturers at art school told me, in no uncertain terms, that I'd never make a living as an artist. He wrote to me just recently – seeking my advice on how to make a living from art.

I didn't respond. He might well have forgotten the discouraging, depressing impact of his words but I haven't. Then again, a lot of people from my past have chosen to 'redact' their history with me since I became one of art's nano-celebrities. Strangers come up to me at shows or email my studio to remind me of some tenuous connection with them through people whose names I only half recognise. Old boyfriends whine to members of my family that I don't stay in touch or that I owe them some obscure emotional debt. A handful of art dealers, including some who have never represented my work, claim responsibility for my current success (none of them had anything to do with it).

I've drawn a line somewhere around 2005 as the cut-off. That was the year I packed up my few possessions at my father's house in Melbourne, where I'd been living, threw them into the back of a rented station wagon and drove to Sydney intent on re-starting my life and my badly stalled career. My relationships since then, both personal and professional, have been chosen (and maintained) with much more care than any I had before.

Even better – and maybe for the first time in my life – that care has been returned.

Secret Messages To Myself

Sometimes I'm asked what the words scrawled across my watercolours say.

In the small images on my blog, they're mostly random snatches, phrases found rattling around inside my head. In my larger works on paper, they're often poems by someone quite notorious both within and outside the arts who insists on anonymity. I break the intricately crafted words into fragments, re-ordering them to fit a particular work. The writer knows this and doesn't care. Sometimes I combine them with my own words: I partially erase them on the page so that they're reduced to a texture of half-formed thoughts.

I resisted using words for a long time. They were always more definite, more revealing than images and left little room for interpretation. Or so I thought. Then I realised my images have always reflected much more of me than I cared to admit. My attempts to obscure myself were self-deceptive. I decided to let it all out.

I don't like to over-explain my work but when a collector asks about specific words in my paintings, I tell them. I want them to experience and understand every part of the work but also, in the end, revealing their meaning makes me feel a little freer of myself.

The Worst Kind Of Waiting

The worst part of finishing a commissioned work is waiting to hear what the collector thinks of it.

When I deliver a study, I always provide an overview of how and why I created it in the way that I did. But I have learnt that the best thing I can do is make myself scarce. The purchase of an artwork is an intensely personal thing but it's even more so when the work is commissioned because the collector feels instrumental in its creation.

Inevitably, they have a picture of what they were expecting in their head. If my work doesn't match it – and it hardly ever will – they need to time to absorb the differences, to become acquainted, as it were, with what has come out of my head. It can sometimes (thankfully, not often) be difficult.

This morning, I finished the final study for The Gambler ('All In'), the last of the paintings commissioned in my two-year series of Dangerous Career Babes. Although outlining has already begun on the full-size frame in the studio, I'm now on tenterhooks to hear how the collector reacts to its intense red and shimmering patches of gold on a stark field of high-gloss, flawless white.

Working In The Raw

I spent most of yesterday re-thinking, then re-drawing, a Dangerous Career Babe. Again. And again.

The fifteenth in the series of 24, I'd expected this one to be relatively easy. I'd begun with a clear idea of what I wanted. But nothing I'd envisioned worked as well as I'd expected. I'm still not sure why. Now, with the study almost finished – and the main figure already drawn onto a 2.10 metre by 1.60 metre timber board and some of the main outline work begun – I am struggling with its details, the small, seemingly insignificant elements that animate the figure and give it authenticity.

Time like these, I begin to hate the highly controlled, almost mechanical requirements of my hard-edged enamel paintings. More than once, over the past ten years, I have promised myself that I'd walk away from them. Although simple-looking, colourful and accessible, their precise black line-work demands careful plotting at the study stage followed by muscle-numbing control in execution. The areas of high gloss colour are, in reality, almost as flawless as the enameled body of a new car but are not sprayed but brushed, then painstakingly sanded back and brushed again, layer after layer.

Then there's the carcinogenic miasma of enamel fumes that irritates the skin and burns the eyes, nasal cavities and throat, even through long-sleeved overalls and the industrial-strength filters of a face mask. A full-body suit is almost impossible to work in and maintain precise control over a brush, so Jim, my senior assistant, and I end up throwing our health concerns to the wind and shedding all protection in order to paint more fluidly.

Thinking Aloud – And Big

Apart from taking an hour out yesterday to respond to Hugh Macleod's questions, I've done little else except sit at my desk and draw. I've been laboring over the details of a study drawing for another Dangerous Career Babe. I want to have it finished by tomorrow morning so that the line-work can be completed on the gessoed timber frame now waiting in the studio and the main areas of colour applied.

This is the very last of the commissioned Babes. Another nine are for my own inventory and although I might eventually display them on my website, none will be exhibited or offered for sale – at least not any time soon.

As mentioned elsewhere, the 24 enamel on board paintings were originally conceived as one work to be experienced as an installation in a large-scale interior space. I worked out today that, when finished, the group will cover around 21,000 square feet of wall space. However, with individual paintings now distributed around the world, that's unlikely to happen.

Instead, I am exploring the possibility of creating enormous one-off billboard versions of each and displaying them in different locations around a major city – Los Angeles would be perfect, as would Tokyo. Can you imagine the subversive effect of The Terrorist (above), at night, bathed in halogen, right above Sunset Plaza or the intersection outside Shibuya station?

Of course, in order to pull off something so extravagant, I need money. Lots of it. A couple of multinational corporations have expressed their curiosity about the idea but I might try to fund it privately so I'm not be beholden to some brand or product strategy. I'm nothing if not stubbornly ambitious.

Breaking The Surface

I took a couple of weeks away from, well, everything. When I came back, my digital inboxes were overflowing with reminders that for better or worse, my career has a life of its own and doesn't always need me around to keep it occupied.

The first email I opened was from Sotheby's. They wanted permission to reproduce one of my earliest paintings, Ultra Violet One, in the catalogue for their Important Australian Art sale in Melbourne, on August 24th. The next two were from collectors asking my help to sell three other works: my very first, The Moment Before Having, as well as two of my most favourite, The Cherry Picker, and Dangerous Career Babe: The Terrorist.

It struck me that this is the first time in a decade that so many of my works have been available at once, other than during an exhibition – thanks not just to a difficult local economy but also the widely publicised high prices my paintings have attracted at auction over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, these prices have also encouraged inexperienced sellers to expect huge multiples on what they originally paid for my work, regardless of its quality.

There were also a handful of requests for interviews. I didn't really feel like putting my 'game face' on for the mainstream media but I was happy to take on ten questions posed by one of my favourite bloggers, the renowned American artist, cartoonist and writer, Hugh MacLeod. My answers felt like something of a manifesto for my happier, more determined state of mind – and a perfect way to announce my return to the virtual space that is (almost) as important to me as my studio. You can read them at Hugh's Gaping Void.

Drawing A Line Within

I'm often asked how I feel about revealing so much of myself in my work – especially in the sexually graphic photographs and drawings and the frank, confessional posts on this blog.

I'm not sure I know the answer. In all my work, I think only about what's needed to express and explore an idea with honesty. I don't hold back.

Where I expose myself the most – and with the greatest emotional vulnerability – is in the line-work of my drawings. Whether I'm sketching loosely for a watercolour or draughting precisely for an enamel painting, the lines reflect my state of mind. Anxiety makes them heavy and lacking subtlety or variation: small details are drawn, erased and re-worked repeatedly and my hand trembles. When I'm stable and happy, the lines run smooth, fast, and are much freer and more confident.

Ironically, I draw best when I feel nothing. It's not about being numb. It's about allowing a deeper, subconscious state – one that influences without being apparent – guide my hand rather than having a temporary, 'surface' mood overwhelm my control and undermine the work.

Here Be Monsters

If you've been wondering why I haven't written about myself as much as usual, lately, it's because I can't stand my own company. My mood has been – to say the least – labile. I've managed to work reasonably steadily since Monday but more than once, I've had to resort to the crisis centre at my local hospital for help. The worst has been what the psychiatrists term 'rapid cycling'. Within just a few hours I can zig-zag from being acutely focussed and productive to frantic, self-destructive and unable to cope – then back again, wreaking havoc on everyone (and everything) around me. In between, I'm drained and exhausted.

Medication helps. So does sex. I suspect I do too little of either to sustain their benefits. If I'm not drawing or painting or dealing with the myriad details that clog the intersection of my art and business, I'm in bed. Asleep, I don't have to deal with a damn thing, especially my own damaged self.

He Has It Whipped

There are few Gen' X or younger art students anywhere who don't owe some small measure of their education or inspiration to books published by Benedikt Taschen.

From low-priced but good-looking paperback reference works on 20th century artists , art movements, architects and designers and obscure anthologies of European and American fetish photography, Danish gay porn' and fashion to monstrously sized – and priced – limited edition catalogues raisonnés of Benedikt's favorite artists and photographers, among them the late Helmut Newton, Peter Beard and Jeff Koons, Taschen's back-lists offer everything in the way of references or resources an enquiring creative mind might ever need.

Taschen, the imprint, started in a ratty comic-book store Benedikt ran in Cologne, Germany, in 1980. He began publishing original, somewhat raunchy comics but quickly cottoned onto the idea of designing picture books on artists who had been dead long enough for their rights to be in the public domain. He also figured out that what he lost in sales on so-called 'quality' subjects he could make up with risqué collections of pre-war porn' positioned as art.

Today, Taschen is a billion-dollar operation, one of the largest and most successful privately held publishing companies in the world. It's still committed to unusual books on art, design, photography, travel and popular culture – and, yes, sex, albeit much better packaged than before.

I've been a fan of Benedikt, now 48-years-old – and his partner-in-crime and ex-wife, Angelika – ever since I came across a portrait of them (above) in the now-defunct British bible of '80s style and pop culture, The Face when I was just a teenager. Photographed by David Lachapelle in the Taschen's flying-saucer-like John Lautner-designed house overlooking Sunset Boulevard (it featured in Brian De Palma's psychological thriller, Body Double, in 1984): Benedikt was on all fours, with the arse torn out of his business suit; Angelika stood nearby, masked but completely naked, a whip ready to flay his bared buttocks.

Twenty years on, I still can't imagine another billionaire publisher – certainly not Rupert Murdoch, Si Newhouse, nor Jann Wenner – being reckless enough to pose that way, just as I can't imagine another publisher who'd be reckless enough to produce a boxed, four-colour hardcover and DVD set on the career of porn star, Vanessa Del Rio, or a 738-page limited edition history of the couturier Valentino.

As Helmut Newton once observed, "There are very few like him. Or there are none like him. He is also, I might add, a madman." Maybe but it's good to know that in this increasingly hide-bound, unremarkable world, there are still some who subscribe to Oscar Wilde's dictum: "Nothing succeeds like excess."

Heart Like A Wheel

Uniquely, both the subject and sub-title of my latest Dangerous Career Babe – The Race Car Driver (Homage To Hellé Nice) – were suggested by the collector who commissioned it. I had always planned to paint a distaff interpretation of a modern, glam' 'boy racer', such as Lewis Hamilton, but the collector was adamant that his Babe's identity should be rooted in motor-racing's early years. It took just one look at the archival photographs of 1930s' cars and drivers he sent for me to be convinced.

To be honest, I was quite taken with the dashing, Italian-born motorcyclist-turned-driver, Tazio Nuvolari,who became know as Il Mantovano Volante – The Flying Mantuan – or Nivola even before winning the 1932 European Grand Prix championship. The founder of Porsche, Dr Ferdinand Porsche, once called him "The greatest driver of the past, the present, and the future."

Then the collector turned me on to a woman driver of the period. Hellé Nice tore up tracks in Bugattis and Alfa Romeos as well as well-appointed beds in dalliances with scores of aristocratic or wealthy (or, sometimes, just plain reprobate) men of her day.

“I don’t believe she ever thought about anything but sex and showing off," one on-track rival said about her, long after her death.

She started out as a dancer and trapeze artist – at the legendary Casino de Paris – and an enthusiastic nude model, before finally finding her true calling as an audacious race driver and an unlikely pioneer or feminism. She toured the world on an early circuit that took in Monte Carlo, Rio De Janeiro and Casablanca as well as famous races at Monza and Silverstone.

I guess it's the way of all fairy tales that such a fearless but profligate figure should die in obscurity, penniless. Her last address was the top floor of an attic apartment, looking out onto a seedy part of Nice. It's said she had lost her social acceptance thanks to an ill-founded accusation of an affair with a Nazi officer during the World Warr II occupation of France. But the truth was her reputation never recovered from a crash in which she killed six spectators, during the 1936 Grand Prix de Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Not Your Mother's Dress-Up Dolls

The production of the Dangerous Career Babes series accelerated when I set up a studio just to handle these large enamel paintings, late last year. It slowed only when I had to travel to Melbourne, three weeks ago, to be with my father, who has been diagnosed with cancer.

This week, I got back to work. I supervised the repair and re-finishing of three works in the series that were damaged because of carelessness in my old studio. I also began two completely new additions – The Race Car Driver (Homage To Hellé Nice) and The Card Hustler – both commissions.

The Race Car Driver was a particular challenge. It was devised for a collector who was a fan of the early years of car racing, from the the 1930s to '50s, when glamorous figures such as Tazio Nuvolari and later, Juan Manuel Fangio and Jack Brabham, dominated European tracks. A different breed from 21st century Formula One drivers, with their fire-proof underwear, reinforced Kevlar and carbon-fibre helmets, and body-hugging Nomex suits covered with team and sponsor logos, mid-20th century drivers valued style over safety. They wore stylishly cut street clothes with quilted cloth head-warmers – similar to the leather head-gear favoured by early aviators – as well as aviator goggles and occasionally, a silk scarf.

One of the hardest things when painting any Dangerous Career Babe is to keep it simple, to let the clothing and accessories speak and not distract from them with complicated, detailed backgrounds. I have always to remind myself that the series is, very genuinely, a conceptual work – it just happens to comprise twenty-four, 2.0m by 1.6m paintings.

As I wrote, last year:

As female children, we create an extension of ourselves by dressing up dolls. In a similar way, a lot of women still dress up to pretend roles as adults. This is different to actually being something – a real career babe. Rather, it's a form of play-acting. No skills are needed, and the career can change every day. Feminism made a broader range of female career characters believable. Post-feminism, we not only see imagery of women posing in various uniforms and career-outfits, we watch them enacted in mainstream films – Angelina Jolie as tomb-raider Lara Croft or a sexy assassin in Mr & Mrs Smith, Charlize Theron as Aeon Flux, or Salma Hayek as vampire Santanico Pandemonium in From Dusk Till Dawn.

When I drew the first Dangerous Career Babe, I intended the torso and legs to remain the same in each painting but to adapt the arms according to the props. Instead, I have been able to use exactly the same pose. The images are a lot stronger this way. I've realised that it's because it makes the figure seem more like a combination of an action figure and a Barbie doll. One hand is designed for holding, and props can be slid into it. The other is gestural, indicating some kind of communication or action that can be interpreted according to the qualities associated with each costume the figure wears. Mostly, the props are unnecessary. I just think it's fun to include them.

Just as in real life, the costumes are the key. The figure is a dress-up doll. The career the figure assumes in each painting is identifiable because of the clothes.

A Shard Of Memory

He’d changed his name to rhyme with gateaux, French for 'cakes'. He delighted in being fat. It was, he said, a political statement – a physical rejection of the mainstream ideal of 'thin'.

“Fat is the new punk,” he'd insist. I was sympathetic.

I'd agreed to design a tattoo for him but I never found the time to do it. He wanted an homage to A Clockwork Orange, except that in it, Alex had to be a girl. For years, he left space for it between his other tattoos. The word 'suffer', all in large, Gothic upper case, was inscribed on his back. I asked him why. "Because that way," he said, "It's always behind me."

Eye, Hand, Mind And Heart

I woke up early, showered and shaved my head to the scalp. I studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It took me aback. I saw an androgynous, angular and somewhat alien creature. Thin scars marred the pale smoothness of its skin and its eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.

At least it wasn't crying.

I caught up with correspondence and arranged consignment of a handful of small works on paper to two clients in the USA. I negotiated the sale of a second of my Precious Blood enamel on board paintings to a collector in Melbourne. I planned what paintings I would try to finish at the enamel studio during the coming week. Finally, when I couldn't find another excuse to put it off anymore, I opened my sketch-book and began to draw.

It took nearly 12 hours, with only a few short breaks, for the eye, hand, mind – and, yes, heart – to reconnect enough for me to draw with confidence. For the first several hours, I had to stifle the urge to rip out the pages and retreat to my bed. I felt like an inept, talentless, unimaginative fraud.

Or I did until just before dawn. As the pale rim of a winter sun rose from the grey-blue ocean into a drear, watery sky, tentative, too-careful marks gave way to quick, confident lines. Slowly, the lines turned into a picture.

The End Of (Bad) Days

It's been a hell of a fortnight. I thought I was doing OK when I flew to Melbourne to be with my father, who had just been diagnosed as having cancer. I managed to hold it together right up until I left, even though my visit re-opened a lot of old family wounds.

I lost it two days after I got back. Despite a backlog of commissions and growing pressure to prepare for exhibitions next year, I couldn't face painting. I couldn't face anything. I took my phone off the hook and burrowed deep into my bed, where I sobbed myself to sleep. Every night.

Awake, I castigated my boyfriend – and anybody else foolhardy enough to enquire about my well-being – for not 'getting' my intricate, self-immolating catalogue of personal failures. My studio staff went into siege mode, cancelling appointments and putting off visits from possible buyers.

My boyfriend fled to another country but stayed in touch daily, by Skype. Mostly, he remained stoic as I launched into tirades about how everything I was going through was, somehow, his fault. This morning, I regained my sanity. I got out of bed and showered for the first time in a week. I tidied my house and my studio. As if on cue, my long-suffering boyfriend turned up on my doorstep.

I did whatever any girl who has acted like an irrational, ungrateful, self-flagellating harpie would do: I dragged him back to the bed in which I'd entombed myself for the past week and fucked him hard for hours until we'd wrung every ounce of anguish and doubt from our weary hearts and flesh.

Money, Money, Money

I was too depressed today to be anything other than fatalistic about tonight's auction at Menzies Art Brands. I had no plans to attend – I never do. Instead, I stayed at home, in bed, and wrapped myself in a goose down duvet and a miasma of self-negating depression.

The phone call from a contact at the auction house was brief. Bids had started at $A7,000 and quickly broken through the lower end of the pre-sale estimate of $A10,000 to $A15,000, to exceed the seller's reserve. The hammer fell at $A13,000 but once the so-called 'buyer's premium' of 22 per cent (plus 10 per cent sales tax) is added , the price paid will exceed the top end of the estimate by several hundred dollars.

I allowed myself to relax and take a long, deep breath. The work had ripped throught its estimate – an excellent result in the current market, especially when one considers that it represents an almost fifteen-fold return on the $A900 invested by whoever bought it at my first, self-produced exhibition, twelve years ago, in Brisbane.

I hope it ends up in a good home, somewhere it will be seen and enjoyed every day: that's worth a lot more to me – and real art lovers – than money.

Perfomance Anxiety (Again)

I've been affected badly by my recent trip to Melbourne to be with my father. I was glad to be able to support him while the extent of his cancer was investigated. But so many long-suppressed tensions and resentments were resurrected between us that by the time I returned to Sydney, I was a wreck. Now I'm gripped by a deep, irresolvable depression, unable to think straight, unable to work with any constancy.

I'm also experiencing the usual, irritable anxiety I get just before a high-profile auction of my work. There are less than 18 hours before Lolita At 16 goes under the hammer at Menzies Art Brands. I have no financial stake in the outcome but I'm pragmatic enough to recognise that it is yet another test of my still-new standing as a 'bankable' artist. An executive at the auction house has told me the overall market climate is "difficult".

I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If demand for my work remains strong, collectors will continue to buy it – at auction and from me – despite the recession.

Getting A Break With Tradition

The first time I ever had contact with an auction house was three years ago, when Menzies Art Brands asked me for permission to reproduce an image of an early painting in a catalogue. I said, "Sure." I also emailed further information about the work, including a correction to the title attributed to it. This process was repeated the next few times my work was submitted for Menzies Art Brands sales. I began to develop a rapport with key senior staff.

This year, one of the paintings from my Lake Eyre On Acid series was submitted for auction just as I was celebrating the 500th post here by offering a free, limited edition, signed photographic study related to this series. I suggested to the auction house that they place a 120 of these studies (enclosed in a hand-made glassine envelope with a blurb about the work) on each seat on the evening of the auction.

The studies were intended as a gift, an expression of gratitude. They were also an attempt to introduce something new and different into an otherwise predictable process, a reminder that while art auctions are about money and investment, they're also about art.

I didn't expect Menzies Art Brands to agree. It was a far from conventional proposal. Nevertheless, they did and when I turned up an hour before the auction with the prints in hand, the staff were excited. These days, auction houses in Sydney, Melbourne and London – even the esteemed Christie's – deal with me regularly, just as they deal with gallerists, curators and private sellers, even though I have never sold any of my own work through them.

The latest 'hard copy' catalogue of the upcoming Deutscher-Menzies auction catalogue arrived in the post today. It includes an image of one of my earliest enamel paintings, Lolita At Sixteen, listed as Lot No. 10. A young woman is aiming a pistol but although her grip on it looks competent it is actually so wrong that it makes it difficult for her to squeeze the trigger – a metaphor for the often clumsy self-discovery of teenage sexuality.

Printed below the usual descriptive details about the work is a somewhat personal paragraph about the conception of the work. I'd emailed it to the auction house but hadn't asked for it to be included. It's the first time I've seen a contribution from an artist in an art auction catalogue. The text is usually written by critics, academics, or so-called 'art specialists'.

Like the gift of the photographic studies, it's another first: an example of the guerilla methods of an artist working outside the traditional art system in Australia merging with the well-established formula for a high-dollar auction sale. Let's hope it helps my works to sell in this very uneasy market.

Even Cowgirls Get The T-Shirt

One of the several things I did to promote my first exhibition of sexually explicit photography in Melbourne, last year, was to create t-shirts that had the one-word title of the show – PORNO – on the front and a reproduction of its widely distributed poster on the back. MARS gallery employees and catering contractors wore them on opening night and over the next week about 100 more were sold to collectors or 'fans'. Since then another 50 or so have been sold or given as gifts by my studio.

I'm always surprised when I see the limited edition t-shirts on the streets of Sydney or Melbourne. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to see a photo of a rare, signed one – posted by a fellow artist (Hazel Colditz, from Arizona) on Twitter – being worn in a café in, of all places, Missoula, Montana. I can't help wondering what the other patrons made of it.

National Art Hate Week

It was probably only a matter of time before "the artist sometimes known as Billy Childish" surfaced again to rail against the crumbling bricks-and-mortar of Britain's art establishment. One of the founders of an informal movement known as Stuckism – a name bestowed by Childish's former lover, Tracey Emin, who told him his art was "stuck. Stuck, stuck." – the 40-year-old Childish (real name Steven John Hamper) has since forged a grudging art world respect as a cultural provocateur through a series of eccentric identities and a relentless output of paintings and prints, self-published books, music CDs, as well as tours with a handful of cult bands (I'm a big fan of The Buff Medways) and the production of a range of neo-Victorian prison merchandise.

Now, in the guise of The British Art Resistance – in association with the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and Private Ladies and Gentlemen’s Club for Art, Leisure and the Disruptive Betterment of Culture, a new art space in Clerkenwell, London, that features the works of British artists Harry Adams, James Cauty, Jamie Reid, Geraldine Swayne, A.S. Waghorne and of course, Childish – he is mounting National Art Hate Week.

As the B.A.R.'s brief manifesto explains: "National Art Hate Week has been instigated for the disruptive betterment of culture.

"It is a call for direct action against the mass acceptance of art, the grip of control over culture as a tool for mediated emotion, market lead, non-critical homogeny and boring popularism.

"National Art Hate Week presents a unified front of non-unified creative individuals against all that is despicable and loved by the people.

"We oppose the deliberate socio-economic strategy to make us all complicit in our own dumbness. We oppose the affront of state endorsed auto-cryptic balderdash made by the few.

"We oppose the chosen-few ruffians who have been polished up and elevated for our meagre consumption. All art is tainted. We oppose all art.

"National Art Hate Week takes the swastika hung on the gallows as its symbol of resistance. During National Art Hate Week the good citizens of Albion are encouraged to visit the art institutions of the land and silently seeth.

"If a child offers you a painting during National Art Hate Week you are to turn away in disgust."

What more can I say except that we should all enlist as propagandists. It begins July 13th. For further information, visit the Art Hate Week site.

Memento Mori

Today, I walked to Melbourne General Cemetery.

Throughout my life, cemeteries have been a place of refuge. Taking the phrase 'final resting place' to heart, I find peace and uninterrupted quiet in them.

I've studied the rituals of burial and commemoration of the dead in various cultures but I've rarely taken much notice of those in my own. And yet, here, among the old, weather-worn stone tombstones I noticed for the first time newer, more elaborate vault-like structures, some almost like Thai spirit houses, shaped from polished marble and granite. Their surfaces were polished smooth and engraved with gold-leafed lettering.

On some, statues of Christ, the Virgin Mary, lesser saints and cherubs, as well as plastic flowers, urns, and photographs of the deceased were padlocked behind leaded or steel-framed glass shutters. On others, open books carved in marble sat atop grave slabs, bookmarked with natural flowers in various stages of decay. On a few graves of children, there were less formal, makeshift shrines featuring stuffed teddy bears, small dolls , toys, even a lollipop.

We live in groups so maybe it's only to be expected that we're buried in groups when we're dead. But I can't help but think of tombs and vaults as prisons in which our earthly remains have to be sealed while our souls await salvation. (Never mind that our burial places will probably dug over first, in land reclamations engineered by future real estate developers.)

When I think of my own death, I rarely consider what will happen to my corpse. I think I'd like my ashes to be scattered randomly or buried. Having striven all my life for a sense of freedom, I'd want whatever's left of me after death to be uncontained.

Riding Ahead Of The Reaper

I haven't done any work since I flew to Melbourne on Saturday. Before I left, I spent the day at my studio, drawing and adjusting lines as well as confirming major areas of colours to be painted.

My days here have been spent visiting doctors and hospitals with my father, who has been diagnosed with bone cancer. We walk slowly to appointments, no matter how far away they are. It soothes his anxiety. And mine. There are injections to be had or coarse liquids to be drunk sometimes hours before tests. Every muscle in my body aches with fear and tension: I worry about how he must feel, especially with the extent of his disease still being mapped – and the prognosis uncertain.

My father took me to see the classic, custom-detailed Harley Davidson he ordered for himself a few weeks ago. It's street-elegant and loud. He rode bikes during his youth, leaning hard and fast around corners, making sparks fly as the metal exhaust pipe ground against the road. We make jokes about how awful it would be if he'd died before riding it. We share a dark sense of humour – what can either of us do right now but try to laugh as much as possible? – but I remind him that he's not dying yet.

The Harley shop is staffed by rough-looking stereotypes of bikers. My father knows them all and introduces me to them. TV screens drop from the ceiling, playing endless tapes of bike shows and strippers. Laminated photographs of the bikers are pinned to a cork-board next to a communal coffee machine. I am drawn to the ones with children riding pillion. I know the kids are very ill – the opportunity to ride has been created for them by the Make-A-Wish Foundation – but they look happy and grubby. Their faces, painted like skulls, are smeared with melted ice-cream.

I can't help thinking how fun it must be for them to be wild and unruly, to take risks and impersonate death while protected by a burly outlaw. It's how I used to feel, as a child, with my father. But right now, it's his turn to ride pillion as we navigate a way through this uncertain time.

In Transit

I flew to Melbourne at dusk. When I arrived, I felt cold – but not just from the chill evening air. I found a coffee shop in the terminal and ordered a 'flat white'. Then I sat, quietly, and tried to still my nerves before heading to the luggage carousel. By the time I got there, my bags were the only ones uncollected.

I haven't been back to Melbourne since the middle of last year, when I was here for my PORNO show. The city doesn't hold a lot of good memories for me. Given the circumstances, little about this visit is likely to change that.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Yesterday, I had a rare day off – not even a day, a few hours – in which I forgot about art and the long list of chores that accumulate like dust during the course of a month. I browsed the shelves at a second-hand bookshop, after an unhurried lunch with a close friend, and picked through racks of vintage clothes at one of the few local boutiques that have them. I bought magazines: Juxtapoz, iD, Vogue Italia and a couple of trashy gossip rags.

The phone call hit me like a sniper's bullet in the middle of the street. A member of my family had just been diagnosed with a serious illness. Suddenly, I couldn't breathe and the sunlight that only moments before had felt so cheerful and revitalising was now a predatory searchlight, too bright and hot on my skin. I sat down on a public bench on the sidewalk and cried. Then I rang the person dearest to me: "You have to go. Be with them. Now." he told me.

In the space of the next couple of hours, I rescheduled two weeks of painting with my assistants, packed my bags (including one containing a printer and scanner), cleaned up my house and booked an open return plane ticket to Melbourne. I withdrew a few hundred dollars in cash from my bank account. I rang other members of my family.

Now I am ready to leave. Art feels like an imposition, getting in the way of the awful randomness of real life.

You Can't Go Home Again, Part One

I returned to Brisbane on a long, sleepless flight from London. A few friends picked me up at the airport. On the drive back into the the city, all of us crammed into a rusting, old Japanese sub-compact, we sucked on plastic bongs and made calls to sleepy connections to hook up with harder drugs. Someone had a Regurgitator tape and it played it very loud on the car’s rattley sound system. Suddenly, intensely, I remembered why I'd made such an effort to leave the place.

The Valley was Brisbane's grimy, sub-cultural refuge then. Its main street was packed with every kind of night-crawling distraction a small Australian city had to offer.

Gurning ravers danced at The Beat, where they could lose themselves in drug-induced, pseudo-spiritual oneness with the smoke and green laser beams. Everyone in the room faced the DJ – or the front door, so they could check out the incoming drug dealers and each other. The acrid, chemical stench of drugs and sweat hung out above the dance floor. Drag queens performed at midnight: later, they’d wander down the street, bickering regally with each other, and offer unsolicited fashion tips to passers-by.

The Zoo was an old warehouse at the end of the block. I don’t remember much about it except that when I was there, I was always stoned, tripping on acid; it made me distracted and forgetful. There were always queues of people waiting to get in. Every hip, tattooed, pierced, natty dreadlocked or shaven-headed, ambisexual feral, punk or rock and roller went there to see a hot new band before it 'blew up'. I was no different.

Outside the strip clubs, bouncers ushered in the working girls ahead of the drunks, who would arrive soon after the surrounding pubs had closed. Hookers, pimps, and dime-bag dealers plied their trade, heroin addicts shot up and alcoholics loitered, impotently, in the dark lanes. The hookers straddled cocks in their johns' parked cars or ducked into doorways to blow wary, awkward-looking pedestrians.

So Money, Babe

After a frustrating day, yesterday, during which I drew and redrew elements of a new picture without actually moving the composition on from where I started, I slept badly. My scalped itched and burned and I lay awake, resisting the urge to scratch, for several hours. I crawled out of bed at dawn, pulling the duvet with me to defend against the gelid drafts of Sydney's coldest morning of the year. I cursed myself for having committed to meet with Max Markson, one of the city's best-known 'celebrity' public relations advisers: I wondered whether we would have anything to talk about, especially as I didn't see where I might fit in a client list that ranges from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy's Carson Kressley to Joe Bugner, onetime British heavyweight boxing champion. As it turned out, Max was charming and smart and after a couple of hours, we began to recognise that it might be fun to work together.

Maybe one reason why I was hesitant to schlepp up to Max's harbourside home in Sydney was because I still looked like a survivor of a napalm bombing. To alleviate this, I adopted a stereotypical all-black, Bohemian look, albeit with uptown flourishes: working around a pair of Mela Purdie leggings cut up and re-sewn as a head covering, I wore a black linen, buttoned shirt and linen drawstring pants, Italian-made J.P. Tod ankle boots, various African and Asian bracelets and necklaces, and a Bottega Veneta woven leather hobo bag.

I kept hearing Vince Vaughn delivering that line from Swingers – "You look so money, babe" – and somehow it made me feel better.

The Pitiful Price Of Vanity

I've not felt like writing or drawing much these past couple of days. For one thing, I've been depressed. For another, the attempt to dye my hair from black to platinum went horribly wrong: my scalp is sore and ulcerated from an allergic reaction to the chemicals used and I have had to shave off all my hair to relieve it. Now I look like I'm undergoing an aggressive cancer therapy or I've been exposed to radioactive isotopes – neo-Chernobyl chic, I'm calling it. No, it's not pretty.

Worse, I'm falling behind schedule. Again. I have three Dangerous Career Babes to be started at the enamel 'factory' and I am working on drawings for two more. I'd planned to have the latter done yesterday but I'll be bloody lucky if they're ready by the end of next weekend.

Pieces Of Myself

Not every interview I do ends up being published. About one in ten is 'spiked' by the editor and never used. At least half are heavily edited between my mouth and the final page (for which, very often, I'm grateful). Some are abbreviated or re-written beyond recognition.

While tidying up my digital archives, this weekend, I came across the transcripts of a handful of interviews I've done over the past year or so. I can't remember who conducted them or what magazines, e-zines or newspapers they were for but I thought I'd choose some of the questions and answers at random and reproduce them here:

A lot of your work is saturated with eroticism. Why?

I don't see my work as erotic, really. It just reflects an aspect of how young women in the developed world see themselves thanks to advertising, entertainment, even commercial pornography. For better or worse, sexuality is always an element of these heavily mediated choices of identity.

Do you think more and more contemporary art appears to be preoccupied with sex?

No. I think there's always been both sexuality and sensuality in art. It's as visible in the works of Michaelangelo as it is in those of Picasso or Modigliani. However, these days, we don't have the same social, religious or gender constraints. We're able to delve more deeply and frankly, creating art that is more explicit, darker and in my case, confessional and/or critical.

How do viewers react to seeing your work for the first time in a gallery?

Reaction is always, umm, unsettled. My works are as immediately accessible as advertising or entertainment but once a viewer spends some time with them, they realise that there's more going on than they'd thought, that what they're looking at is neither simple nor 'safe'.

A lot of my work exploits the seductive but dulling effect of highly repetitious imagery. One of the more interesting aspects of what I am doing in serial works like Precious Blood is show that this repetition is actually quite ancient. The Catholic Church has used it for nearly 2,000 years to convey notions of female purity and piousness. Look at how similar images of the Virgin Mary are, as well as images of popular saints. Their effect has been as carefully managed as any advertising campaign.

In PORNO you were both artist and performer. Why did you expose yourself and your reputation as an artist in such a way?

When I first started to experiment with depictions of what the tabloid critics liked to call 'graphic sex', a couple of years ago, I was responding to what I saw as consumer culture not just encouraging but actually empowering young women to exploit their sexuality – without any fear of public disapproval (quite the opposite!) – in exchange for a measure of celebrity.

I'd found some other female artists' experiments with elements of softcore porn' – from Sam Taylor-Wood's and Vanessa Beecroft's video performance pieces to Ghada Amer's needlework – just a little too prissy and detached to be interesting. So I became, for a brief while, producer, performer and consumer. In other words, I decided to involve myself completely.

After all, I'm an artist not an academic – I'm meant to be subjective.

Indulging The Diva Within – And Without

In an uncharacteristic and expensive indulgence of my physical vanity, I decided to spend large and have my hair cropped and dyed at a cooler-than-thou Sydney salon. My hair is normally jet black – with flecks of premature grey caused by the toxins in enamel paint – but I wanted to try turning it platinum. I was told to put aside the better part of a day for the process. So I loaded up a satchel with pens, sketchbook, diary, cell-phone, iPod and a non-fiction book (the last is just for show – I love skimming the salon's back issues of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar more than anything) and resigned myself to a day in which I would do absolutely nothing productive or creative. Bliss.

Postscript

If you read Italian (I don't), my GQ Italia interview is now online along with a gallery of selected works. Not all of the images selected are my favorites but hey, I'm thrilled.

The coverage is timely. I am just now getting to grips with trying to tie down dates and venues for exhibitions in Europe during the early summer and autumn, next year. Despite strong support for my work at two Christie's auctions in London, over the past couple of years, I want to devote an extended period of time and energy to raising awareness of it elsewhere in the northern hemisphere.