What did I do when I found out that I had won the Radostar trip to design week in Milano (for my portrait of Yuri Gagarin) together with Benjamin Claessen, Lee Walsh, Claire Hartigan and Elvis Tomljenovic? I panicked, of course. Then i grabbed a few buckets of paint and spent 36 hours straight awake painting a wall tattoo - which is the pattern from my one of a kind* deep purple Turkmen rug, blown up huge on my office wall. The only reason I stopped was because it was 5:30 in the morning and I had a flight to Milan to catch. Hit play on the music, then play on the film. Yes, low-tech, but I'm a little short of time today. ;) * How do I know it's one-of-a-kind? I don't really, all I know is that when we lived in Yiddah and went looking for rugs one day, a intense deep grape purple rug in the shop, hiding away in a corner was sticking out like a sore thumb among the traditional colors. "What is that?" we asked and the shop owners explained that it was made to order by an American woman, but when the rug - hand woven of course - finally arrived six months or so later she scoffed "wrong purple" at it and left. So there it was, the rejected purple rug, with countless hours of handmade knots, and beautiful craftsmanship, laying discarded in the corner of the shop - you know I had to adopt it. It's been in my room - wherever my room has been - and much loved ever since. And I don't even like purple.