I know that some people will get their boxers in a bunch for my drawing My Favorite Gay Tribes and Styles. Speaking about cultures that one doesn’t belong in is criminalized as cultural misappropriation. However, I refuse to do art exclusively about straight white middle-aged middle-class Western European men - I’m a bit more ambitious in my practice. My oeuvre is a compendium of all my knowledge and nightmares, a turbo realist picture of the world, an archive of our time for the future generations. Art must be irreverent, obnoxious, and contentious. I respond only to the Art History.

The heat is on, in the studio
Inside your head, on every beat

Today it's Corpus Christi, aka Solemnity of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Last week I was dripping blood on football jerseys in Tampere. Now I'm back in the studio, the temperature is infernal but I don't care because I paint like having sold my soul.

The Finnish tour was perfect - I was on the cover of both Tampere's Aamulehti and Turku's Turun Sanomat newspapers. Where ever I go in Finland, the press is waiting for me. In both towns young artists who came to meet me said that they always thought I was an asshole but realized that actually I'm not an egomaniac. I've created my obnoxious public image carefully. In person, I'm just lovely.

However, a six-day operation in the art world was enough, I'm happy to back in my real life and at the studio-cum-sauna. Throw more löyly! Turn up the heat!

Oh-wo-ho, oh-wo-ho
Tell me can you feel it

Monday: Driving the kids to school, cooking, laundry.

Tuesday: Off to Helsinki via Madrid. Early flight. A nude photo session and and interview for a magazine. Dinner with my gallery director.

Wednesday: Early train to Tampere. Installing my work - concertina wire and football jerseys - at Finlayson Art Area. Interviews. Dinner with my collector.

Thursday: Interviews. Opening of the show. Book launch of Closing Borders.

Friday: Early train to Turku. Press conference, interviews at Art Goes Logomo exhibition. Lunch with collectors. Opening. Dinner with collectors.

Saturday: Back to Helsinki. Dinner with a collector and making a new art work at his place.

Sunday: Brunch with a collector. Visiting my gallery, delivering a new drawing. Back to Spain.

The day after traveling is always wasted - yesterday I didn't even try to work after landing home from Vienna. Today I've been back in action again. I love the days when I read books and news in the morning and in the afternoon I draw what I've learned and discovered. Today it was mukbang, which is is an online audiovisual broadcast in which a host eats large quantities of food while interacting with their audience. It's online binge eating disorder.

This is the power of my small drawings: they are fast and direct, I don't have to limit my ideas. Maybe I shouldn't paint anymore but concentrate in what I do best and enjoy most, A4 size drawings.

I finished the forty pink monochromes.

I have made a bunch of list drawings on racism for the Vienna show. Opening next Tuesday.

I’m painting - the first time in one year - figurative things on canvas. And it looks good. Sponge Bob Squarepants and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Everything is really fine but I don’t feel satisfied. I’m reading Robert Fisk’s (the famous conflict correspondent) book Pity the Nation (Zena’s recommendation) on the Lebanese Civil War and I want to be like him. Painting junk culture in the studio is too safe for an alpha male like me. My practice is too secure, it doesn’t make me feel alive. I don’t want to go to Vienna, I want to go to Mosul.