Felix's Studio
Deep Dives
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Central Saint Martins
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Felix studied here and it's mentioned as a prestigious art school. Readers would benefit from understanding this institution's significant influence on British art, fashion, and design, and why studying there signals artistic credibility.
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Wetherspoons
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The pub chain appears as a cultural touchstone in the essay's London social scene. Its unique business model, controversial politics, and role in British pub culture provides context for understanding London twentysomething life.
Hello again,
I had a piece out this week about something which has been bugging me for a little while, the strangely conservative bent of heteropessimist discourse and the film Companion, which I did not like at all.
I noticed a little while ago that a lot of my non fiction writing is concerned with the idea of agency. It is fashionable at the minute to write about how little agency we have, and I talk about this in that piece too. I, unfashionably I suppose, often argue the opposite. I noticed more recently that my fiction is concerned with characters who exert their agency too, often in destructive ways, but they exert it all the same. I actually think this is related to where I grew up, in an interesting way, but that is a longer paragraph for something else or a passage to live in my emails forever.
I think everyone should just make the work they believe in whether it's fashionable or not because otherwise what’s the point? Somebody has to be the one, or one of the handful of people, saying this or that thing they think is true or nobody will say it. Which brings me to my topic for this week, my dear friend Felix’s paintings. Here is an Instagram with all the paintings.
Not that they are unfashionable. Or actually it doesn’t matter whether they are or not. They are objectively brilliant paintings. I have two in my flat and everyone who comes spends a long time gazing at them and then creeping up to them to look at certain elements in more detail. Felix was the first person who taught me that you should just make the work you believe in, and if you think that is important to do then it is important to do. I would be a very different person if we had never met, and a much less interesting one (a worse one I think).
If you have read a few of my essays you have probably met Felix on the page before. He appears as a character again and again. Here or here or here. Once, when I wrote about gossip, the essay ended up on This American Life and one of the fact checkers had to phone Felix to check the story and he panicked and put on a sort of “alright guvnor” accent
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