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Once upon a time, a wealthy landlady's daughter told me that this painting of a dark-skinned child with an ancient Latin law book, looks "like a terrorist" and that I had to remove it from her sight. She didn't even live there.

Privilege means demonising people who inconvenience you. Not ever having to see anything that upsets your righteous indignation.  But people who are sad, angry and abused are no longer required smile nicely for your amusement and comfort. 

Now we stand strong. Now we know our values and live according to them. We will not turn away from our own sanity for temporary safety.

I started drawing and painting nudes as a kid, having a mild obsession with our small home library of classical art books. I was censored quite rapidly of course, and dragged to various churchy people to fix me. I wonder how many other artists stopped painting or sculpting entirely thanks to the churchy people or bad schools.

I also frequently snuck away with my dad's Stanley knife and carved little figures out of my mom's clothes pegs. Apparently that was frowned on too.

I am very grateful that nobody was ever able to completely squash that part of my humanity and, when I started selling that art though commercial galleries at age 16, they mostly stopped trying. Money talks.

Art and culture are, of course, not strictly a human phenotype. I am drawn to paint and sculpt the human figure but there is so much evidence of our ancient hominid ancestors making art. There are even some published studies of crows and other non-apes making art, but that will be an essay for another time.

We're fascinated by ourselves. Little children, of course, worshipfully draw their parents, like  people in the dark ages drew their saints. I guess some of us still live there and do that. Women have carved themselves and each other into little "goddess" figures that confused the hell out of prudish Victorian archaeologists. Boys, of course, carved what boys still carve now. Those in between? Well, there are plenty of ancient hermaphrodite sculptures and stories so that's probably worth at least looking at.

It's been too long since I last focused on bodies, dancers and athletes. Watch this space.