Like Noah it is best to build your boat BEFORE the rains fall and let the beguiled drown in their own stupidity calling you ‘paranoid’ than to take risks with the worst possible scenario and the precariousness of a fragile future. Smart dudes buy insurance and leave the psychiatric game to the professionals. We, The Bogside Artists, speak, not from delusional fantasy but from direct experience, as over the years we have been victims of shameless, character defamation, identity theft, social marginalization, calculated denigration of our selves and our work, wholesale, organized targeting of our lives and our achievement and accordingly labelled pro-active capitalists on a par with Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch, supporters of American imperialism, and ideologically to the right of Genghis Khan. All of it lies and damned lies at that, conjured up by jealous minds and hate-driven hearts hiding behind masks of social acceptance and ‘revolutionary’ zeal.
This has been our ‘reward’ for having given our town, and the world indeed, one of the most profoundly socialist art displays in existence – one that world-renowned playwright Brian Friel declared, quite rightly “Diego Rivera would be proud of.” Victimized and targeted we have been and still are, let it be said, by people who live in fine houses, have salaried jobs, lucrative careers, positions of influence in government and the media and who feel free to sell their articles to a gullible world and their books on the net while we have to forego any sort of an income in order to survive as a group. We shoulder our wheel daily not to plan holidays or extend our private interests in the name of business masquerading as ‘social concern’ but in order to survive as a group. Simple as that, facts that visitors we speak to find incredible and disgusting, just as we do. We are a registered charity to boot, a salient fact that our adversaries choose to ignore as it kinda gets in the way of the big, fat, labels of denigration they have pinned to our backs.
Yet, like Noah, we have built our boat regardless. It is called The Bogside Artists’ Studio and it serves the community and the sacred aspirations towards individual freedom and artistic expression that The People’s Gallery , that we three created, makes manifest to all who come to see it. Capitalism be damned! say we. Our enemies and transgressors are a hundred times more ruthless in that regard than we could ever be .. or want to be. We, at least, get to sleep at night, soundly as we adhere relgiously to a simple philosophy – Live and Let Live, something these people seem to be cogenitally incapable of doing.
We take leave here to state our position once and for all and to let you the reader know that if you believe anything else to the contrary of what is here stated by us, you have been lied to, pure and simple, and most likely, lied to by people holding positions of trust and authority who have no right to be there.
Our studio is our refuge and all are welcome. It floats. We sail on. And neither the dark clouds above our heads or the hounds snapping at our heels will ever deter us from hoisting our bright, clean flag of independence and claiming the right to be who we are and always have been – THE BOGSIDE ARTISTS
