The whole world in a grain of sand: the difference between a thought out composition and a snap view. Assume nothing Image Ben Wilson Chewing Gum Artist

Featured Image: worlds within worlds: the fantastic use of art to change discarded pieces of chewing gum on London’s streets into little works of valuable art. Ben Wilson, Chewing Gum artist

Our eyes are baggy, whether we’re young, middle aged or old from the time we can talk we have to be experienced, look cool in our evironment, wear the t shirt.

Act as if we know what we’re doing. Fake it till we make it.

Baggy with one type of culture, the kind that beams at us in ads when we go christmas shopping for a new thing the image of what, say the Hoover Dam or a shopping centre (he he, notice I don’t say ‘mall’), in Las Vegas 

A couple of hundred miles away in south central Los Angeles there’s a food desert. Until the guerilla gardener  Ron Finlay, got his hands on the empty car parks and undeveloped spaces

generations of people believed that this landscape contrast between, say the Meadows Shopping precinct and the lush community gardens, can never be connected.

and why do we think that? Zadie Smith, novelist grew up on a London council estate and understands the visual apartheid that creates no go areas. Once the idea of council housing was to create a better world after the second world war. It’s all how we see resources.

Let’s create the supply chain to link and connect the deserts of Nottingham with the oases.

Because it can change…

Traffic and pollution aren’t normal.

slowly, slowly, slowly, is that the images of fast food and car parks full of cars that we take for granted:

are a shorthand for a need and greed culture that eventually dements and disables us all.

This can change.

Ron Finlay is an artist of change though, he reckons that we’re all the ecosystem of the world he

Yes. He wages a war on terra.

We know what vision is with wonderful ideas like Joanna Lumley’s Garden Bridge Scheme. Wow. We need to do a bit of work to help the excluded first though so that everyone has access to this utopia. The streets and cities, connecting them, connecting the people more, growing more, throwing noone away.

Image courtesy of Arup and Partners

Working in the cracks in the ground from the ground Ron Finlay’s War on Terra turns weapons into tools Image below. It’s not unusual in fact we’ve been doing this long before Marx discovered the dialectics of materialism and realised that all that is solid melts into air

Expect the impossible, the connections between people, the green the good, the odd, the ugly the beautiful in every landscape. Let’s get looking. Inside and outside. Like an artist.

Above: Left Pat Murray’s recent view at the foot of Nottingham Castle, 2017 and Cornelia Parker‘s Exploded Shed ” Cold Dark Matter” 1991

And in the work of photographer Martyn Williams you can feel that we’re not just here for a little while but that we’re always here….

That’s the reason for taking a photograph, making art in all its changing forms visible.

Simply, art now is about fighting the tendency for fast food in everything, allowing yourself the time to get to know something really well and asking it questions through the way you frame it and really wanting to share it, find out what other people think.

A whole range of factors that you find in yourself and outside yourself every day, the challenge is realising that you can make things better.