under

just keeping my head above water

Many of us are aware that some people are method actors, having to encompass all the emotion difficulties when playing at part. It seems that without noticing I have been making work about drowning and in the process, been drowning my self, financially, emotionally etc. So it is with this image that I currently am just about keeping my head above water. I cannot struggle like this forever - lets hope my story has a happy ending.

Tangents, Mallards and peoples heads

A ha! for the avid I'm periodical reader(s) there is some news, I have another blog. Peoples heads is a blog I am dedicating to drawings of peoples heads, faces and other bodily parts, above is Boris Johnston with what can only be described as a Mallard, I have no idea what that could mean.

small books

Ah well if I am going to post about that book I should really post about all the rest as well. This is a book made in one eight hour stint in truro cathedral, a panoramic drawing from one seat, on one piece of paper. (scaled down obviously) original 2m.

Excuse me while I digress

Coasters - an illustrated anthology, has just been released for general sale by Atlantic Press ltd. I have contributed to it with the above image and also I designed it. So if your interested to see more of it you can buy it from me at £8.50 or alternatively from Atlantic Press.

this is the sales blurb:

"it is unusual to come across an illustrated anthology which is so coherent and well choreographed. if as the artist joseph Beuys suggests, thinking is form, then this is a very thoughtful book, expressed through vibrantly drawn and written lines.
Here, poetry aligns both image and text far beyond the poems"

Valeria Melchioretto

nice.

Organs of Sense

In the way we talk about crying, it is often said that we are ‘moved to tears’ like it’s a small town outside Dorset; some strange emotion reassignment or at the very least to a greater place or space that we are not normally present in, so completely immersed are we, that it is impossible to think that it is within us, a part of us, a sensation that we truly inhabit, no – that’s just not British.

But maybe this is the answer, that tears are a physical manifestation of sensation, something that we all too often believe we posses, or are put on us ‘that film made me cry’ and so on, the truth is nobody really knows why we cry emotional tears, and maybe that is because we are so lost and distanced to the ‘now’, to the world, that we miss the obvious. Maybe its something that cannot be explained through science, of course we can dissect tears, induce tears and factualize about tears until we are blue in the face but so far we haven’t found anything concrete, because perhaps like religious / spiritual belief or art, science cannot pin it down, there is no answer. Nobody really knows why we believe in god. So strung up are we in trying to explain everything through this over used language, naming things, explaining things using limited culturally specific grunts known as words, that we could miss that alongside art, music and poetry, tears are a highly expressive form of communication as the English poet Abraham Cowley once wrote ‘Words that weep, and tears that speak.’

image by H.V Carter MD from Gray's Anatomy

The point of tears

Its been too long now since I last posted something, so here goes – this is a drawing from a set of drawings about crying. yes crying. I have been lucky enough to get some of my work published by Atlantic Press due for release in September/October time, the small hard-back book will be (hopefully) created from the same methodology as before, drawings on top of drawings, drawing out the story intuitively.

So I am going to attempt to post more based on my research into why we cry and what the point of them is.