TEN TEXTS FOR PERSONALITIES, ART, AND WORLD
OF THE THIRD KIND

Research shows that the making of art can spring form the most unusual circumstances and from the most unlikely people emphasising that anyone can unlock the pathways to their innate creative abilities. The following ten texts are all possibilities but only one is true. Contact <peterhaining@hotmail.com> with your correct solution, texts, photographs, drawings, etc.

Artist A is a marine biologist living on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. His hobbies include visiting chatrooms to meet like-minded paedophiles with an interest in pre-pubescent mermaids. He is separated from his wife and five children who live in the Mojave Desert, as far from a marine environment as possible. Although his right arm was torn off at the shoulder by a great white shark, he can perform all normal functions with dexterity, agility and humour. He paints from his dark imaginings with oils on canvas using his right foot to support a large, messy palette.

Artist B is a toxicologist specializing in rare bacteria found in the gut of the decomposing corpses of Nubian tribesmen. A campaigner for the rights of gay sub-Saharan Africans, he is a single man with no emotional attachments. He is the progeny of a union between a Congolese pigmy and a Scots missionary from Dumbarton and although he is only 1.6 metres in height he has no trouble in navigating the social hierarchies of white middle-class society. He currently lives in Dar-es-Salaam and is a fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. His art is photographic specializing in experimental black and white darkroom techniques.

Artist C is Ireland’s leading authority on the art of autodidacts. He is a determined recluse whose interests include arson and petty theft from supermarket chainstores. He dreams of suicide, marriage to a woman twenty years his junior, and being wealthy enough to afford hormone replacement therapy and false teeth. His burning ambition is to live on water with no signs of human habitation on the horizon. His art explores the tyranny of daily ritual and identity.

Artist D is a tramp currently living in an abandoned container wagon in Rotterdam that was last deployed to ferry illegal immigrants into the UK via Zeebruger and Dover. She has travelled extensively through Old Europe, the United States of America, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Her recurring nightmare is to wake in a mansion with enough money in her bank account to live the opulent and extravagant materialist lifestyle of an arch polluter of eco-systems. She makes interventions in public places and has been arrested on a number of occasions.

Artist E is a semi-retired stock-broker with no qualms about deceiving the innocent and financially naïve so that he can put caviar and champagne into his and the mouths of his many mistresses. His salubrious apartment in Barbados is the envy of millionaire tycoons and wannabe starlets. His wife, an unrepentant hippy, left him to live in a commune in Goa where she makes knick-knacks from human ivory to feed the insatiable tourist market. She influenced his decision to practice an art which takes ordinary everyday objects, casts them in gold, and sells them to select business acquaintances and collectors.

Artist F is the author of such best sellers as Covens in Croatia, Sex and Contemporary Witchcraft, True Accounts of Abductions by Extra-Terrestrials, and Fifty Nights of Unearthly Passion. He lives in rural Aberdeenshire with his partner, a social worker, and their two children. He is a graduate of University College, London, and his hobbies include psycho-geography, rare single malt whiskies, knitting and weaving, and breeding vipers. His artform is traditional and employs local stone which he believes bonds him to earth forces.

Artist G is a New York gallery director who exhibits the art of idle rich. Mostly this work is given away to anyone who wants it because the artists are so wealthy they can afford to be generous. The gallery operates as a non-profit making charity and also shows the work of social misfits. This work is sold for exorbitant sums far in excess of the art’s true worth. She believes this marketing strategy maintains a philosophical and financial balance. Her dream is to die in the arms of a twenty year old terrorist while he is planning his finale as a suicide bomber. She is a miniaturist, specializing in the painting of postage stamps.

Artist H is a fantasist who enjoys cross-dressing in public and the freedom of naturism during his quality time. He is employed as a postal worker in Lille. During the mail art years he took delight in handling the multi-textural envelopes and packages that were sent through the postal network to artists and galleries in France. He regrets the coming of the digital age with its virtual post and detests having to deliver tons of junk mail each year. When he retires he plans to be a balloonist so that he can drop propaganda published by various dissident groups operating throughout Europe. Originally encouraged by mail art he began making art by designing rubberstamps. Currently he designs posters for radical socialist groups.

Artist I is a zoo keeper in Berlin. Her charges include rhinoceroses, geckoes, piranha and ring tailed lemurs. Her hobbies include extreme voyerism and stalking women policemen when they are off duty. She is married with three children, two girls and one son, and lives in Potsdam. Her ambition is to leave Germany and live in the mountains of Wester Ross where she would set up the world’s first blaeberry plantation. She believes in the current theory that bio-diversity is essential to the growth of tourism and that her own contribution can provide a socio-economic impact on a region of extreme depopulation. She makes busts of politicians from various animal faeces but anticipates moving into landscape-based installations in the future.

Artist J is a plumber and ex-paratrooper. His interests include dogging, unarmed combat and survival training. The skill of water closet maintenance is merely a means towards an end. He has no interest in developing it as a career strategy. His ambition is to be a mercenary for a limited period to earn enough foreign currency to retire and make art. He was recently moved to tears by an exhibition of Outsider Art and believes he too has a worthwhile contribution to make to the world of art.