It’s been a hell of a year. I mean that quite sincerely. It’s also been an amazing heaven of a year, one which I am immensely grateful for and would not change for the world. I have spent the last few months in a kind of real-life retreat, partly from not being legally allowed to work yet, partly from not feeling very inclined to talk to any human beings, and partly to figure out what to do for a living when I grow up.

Luckily I have now come to my senses and recoiled well away from any thought of growing up. I feel twenty, and intend to carry on feeling twenty until I feel like feeling older than that. Maybe I will just flip right up to fifty, one day. I have always liked the idea of being fifty, it seems very relaxing and impressive. So I have decided to spend some time making art again, because it is the one thing I will absolutely regret not doing if I get run over by a bus next week. There is a cafe that does shows by local artists almost right at the bottom of my garden, so no excuse.

I usually hate local art. Not personally, and I don’t blame any single local artist for my opinion. But you know what I mean, you go in a cafe and there is all sorts of uninspiring nonsense all over the place, some of it actively repulsive, and you think maybe there is some virtue in the Changing Rooms/ Trading Spaces mentality after all, if they had just painted a load of squares in pink and mauve it might actually have looked better. Van Gogh prints aren’t the answer, either. Not only are prints of great paintings significantly less than great once printed, they also get worn out, like a great song you listen to just too many times. Even when they reproduce every brush-stroke accurately, as they can do with machines these days. Everything has its limits, which is why modern artists make things you can’t just photocopy and stick on a wall, like sharks in tanks.

Of course, you can go in a room at the Tate gallery and think exactly the same thing about Changing Rooms. It’s somewhat less likely, though. People complain about modern art all the time, but what they forget is that most recent stuff is always going to be bad. It’s supposed to be bad. That’s the way life is, most new stuff is bad and a little bit of it is good. If nobody even tried, that would be worse. This way, the good stuff has the chance of being made and then surviving.

I get depressed about the amount of bad stuff out there, but the truth is it’s not bad at all, only harmless. If people want to spend their time throwing pots of paint around, that’s fine. Most of the art I’ve ever made was not brilliant, in my own opinion. Some of it might be quite good, but I’m very poor at identifying Quite Goodness in my own stuff: if there are flaws, I see the flaws. Art should be perfect. Perfectness is the whole point. You can’t improve a Picasso, and that’s the proof that his vision was right. I may not be Picasso, but if I dropped dead next week I would feel worse about not having made more and better art than anything else I haven’t done. (There’s no point in feeling bad about things you have done: we fall over so we can learn to get up, like it says in Batman Begins.)

So, now I’ve blogged that, I’ve got to do it. Another thing I blogged that I would do was write more about my impressions of the old Eastern Europe. I’ll probably do that when I get round to making a picture of a bit of green wall on the side of Prague castle that I’ve been meaning to do for years.