End of an Era / Pastures New

The times they are a'changin'.

On the 4th October my little shop closed for the last time. It was a huge surprise and we had to adjust to the reality of it with almost no notice, it was a business decision made by the company and we had a couple of trading days before we were packing up. It has truly been a great three years working there with Becky and I am sad that it is over. However I made my peace with the decision pretty quickly and now it's on to a new chapter!

Being as how I am terrible at starting anything myself, and as I have had vague thoughts of leaving for quite a while this has come at a great time really. Redundancy in this context is the best way it could have ended as now I have at least a couple of months to have a think.

Here is the final window that I made there.

Hog Among the Clouds

Though I didn't know it at the time that this would be my final window, it does seem fitting somehow that not only is it the little pig (of which I am most fond)'s first appearance on the glass, but also she seems to be waving goodbye. It was a short stretch anyway to modify it for the closing message:

Closing Notice LGC King's Cross

It has come to a point now where I feel able to take this kind of thing around and see if anyone else wants window displays (if that person is you, hit me up!). I have noticed that a lot of businesses use painted displays and often not very high quality ones, so I am confident there is a niche for more elaborate, illustrative work on glass. Time will tell, I'm trying to think of as many small revenue streams as I can in this time of change so even if it's just a supplement to other things it would be better than nothing.

The Chin Up festival I attended in the summer (see previous post) was truly one of the best festivals I have ever been to and it was a pleasure and a privilege to be involved in running it. One of my tasks I forgot to mention last time was to update the site map I had made for an earlier one. I am quite pleased with the result, though an interesting point is that I made this, and its predecessor, having never visited the site in real life! This has obviously now changed and I think the next map will be even better (and with much more accurate scale).

Chin Up Festival 2016

On the theme of things forgotten, now I have more time for sorting through my work I realise there are a few things from the past year that I haven't shown off enough. These are a selection of illustrations I did in the shop, you may recognise them from Instagram though these are better pictures.

All Aboard the Hog Train

FUIG

Master Yoda

Book Beast

These themes will return and evolve further I feel sure, they are the closest to my intended direction as I can determine from now.

Finally, more regular blogging is one of my new goals, and though I hope some people read this it is mostly to improve my general writing that I do this. Next up: gardening things!

Dreams and Visions

For the last year or so I have been recording my dreams. This has at times lapsed or I have whole weeks where I don't remember any of them, but as far as possible I have been writing down everything I can recall each morning. This hasn't led to much besides a good laugh until recently. I had a very involved 'quest' style dream that inspired me to make a drawing based on it. The feeling throughout was one of uncanny apprehension and I think I have managed to capture some of that in the resulting image. Dream Door was shown in the London Graphic Centre Shop Art exhibition during July and August at the Covent Garden branch.

Dream Door 2016

It is a dispiriting time to be alive in the United Kingdom. Although we've never had it that bad compared to the vast majority of the world, (nor are things ever as bad as they seem: see here for an account of our inbuilt reporting bias) nevertheless our society, and those warring factions within it, seems to be becoming more precarious, bitter and divided than ever. A leaky ship on turbulent seas. I am trying to maintain a hopeful outlook and rally behind those who are working to unite, console and love our fellow citizens, migrant or otherwise. I confess however that this hope is difficult to muster at the moment and I fear the future. I have even less of an idea as to what I should be doing than at any point in the last five-years-of-not-having-any-idea. I desperately want to be making music but can't find the time or the energy. I would love to be working freelance as an illustrator. It's all just so unlikely to succeed. Part of me wishes I had trained as a scientist instead, it was my first great academic love that I sacrificed to become a creative free spirit and look how that's working out...

The doom and gloom must be lifted. I have a wonderful family who always remind me that I am extraordinarily lucky to have had the start in life that I have. With my auntie and cousins I have recently spent a week in Cornwall doing seaside-y things and another week in Scotland with family and friends, both of which have been a much needed tonic for my soul.

Family is a bizarre entity to consider when you think about it. Taking humans as a whole, there is barely a statistically significant variation in our genetics; in other words we are identical to all other humans in all but a tiny proportion of our genes. Within this astonishing homogeneity the group closest to us, our family, are literally our flesh and blood - displaying so little variation from ourselves that we are clones in everything but appearance (and indeed sometimes even then). The functional result of this in my case is that in their company I experience a blurring of what it means to be an individual. We cease to operate as totally independent units and begin to function like parts of an organism, moving, eating and deciding our course as a hive rather than a 'person'. The love I feel for my genetic hive mates is of a markedly different character than that which I feel for anyone else, less a trusting emission across the void between individuals, more how you might feel about a part of your own body. My understanding of the world is entirely conditioned by being within it, if attacked I would fiercely protect its safety, and I love it in a way that is both more prosaic and infinitely more profound than any other experience. This is not a profound insight. It does not say anything meaningful about the human condition generally but it has been on my mind a great deal. All I know for sure is that my young cousin Max McPhail is the fattest, cutest baby in the world and seeing Oliver and Emma transition from 'people' into 'parents' is an extremely strange and moving thing, of which my understanding grows by tiny incremental steps. 

How perfectly astonishing it is that we exist at all!

To drag this away from metaphysics I will end on a short account of the end of the summer when I was helping out at the marvellous Chin Up Festival in Sussex. This is a small independent festival of art, music, poetry and fun conceived by Caylee and Leroy Farndon-Taylor, a sibling duo of incredible power! Two days in the woods among some of the best people I know, super relaxed atmosphere, great music, arty treats, it was wonderful. I was roped into doing some live drawing for an art battle (!) for the first time. This was terrifying but I got into it eventually - the very talented Faace and I collaborated to create this large strange picture:

Image by Sophie Coleman

Image by Sophie Coleman

As I began writing this post in June this all seems a bit retrospective compared to more recent activity and future hopes. I will return soon with a more up to date summary. Until then, good fortune fellow travellers!

Literary Schmiterary

Since February, when I last went home to Lancashire for the weekend and saw my new baby cousins for the first time, things have been different. 

I don't want to come over all sentimental - all that hard work suppressing (poorly) my true, soft-touch-self must not be in vain! - but there has been something transformative about that weekend. Whatever pseudo-profound causes can be suggested, the outcome has been one of renewed purpose and clarity, for which I am very grateful and which is long overdue.

The commitment I made to myself at the start of the year to write more has been upheld to some extent; nothing may yet see the light of publicatory day but that's not the point. As my father is fond of quoting, 'Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, writing an exact man.' (usually followed by 'Bacon. (a fat man)' but anyway...) This aphorism neatly summarises the inherent benefit of writing in addition to merely conversing and reading, and the subtle difference of application each form has. When I consider the way in which I have spent my life to date, it is obvious that I have done a great deal of reading and talking but hardly any writing, and I have come to believe that this goes some way towards explaining my general lack of focus. Squeezing the swirling mass of information we absorb daily through the piping bag of the written word forces us to introduce order into the chaos. 

So far this has not produced the next War and Peace, nor will it in all likelihood, but I will continue to pick away at this literary scab until I have something worth showing off. If even that never happens I still think it will have been worth it for the mental benefits alone.

In window display news I have tried hawking my wares a bit more than usual, mixed results so far, but to try and aid my quest I have gone for something a bit more elaborate than usual at LGC; for once I am genuinely pleased with the result:

Posca pen, paper and cardboard. All real plants no made up ones, all from the Amazon rainforest, some exaggerated scaling and colour but otherwise legit. Toucan by Becky. Jungle is massive. 

To the low bastards that have burgled us for the second time in six months - you can take my stuff but you will never crush my spirit. I am trying to take the philosophical view of this whole business, sometimes I succeed, sometimes the anger is overwhelming. Generally though I feel pity more than hate for somebody who would do this, by contrast anyone who doesn't feel compelled to turn to crime to get through life is extremely lucky as the system has not completely failed them. 

Finally, the drumkit arrived and is completely amazing. We haven't put it to work yet for our follow-up musical travesty to Summertime is Great, but I have been practising playing and recording. Turns out playing drums is all well and good but recording is nails; more on this to come.