2007

it's the time of the year when you get those 'round robin' family news letters through the post, usually found inside a christmas card from someone that you've not been in touch with since you exchanged cards last christmas...

in the past sue and i have been a bit sniffy about such missives, but this year we've had a couple of rather lovely and inspiring family news letters, so having now revised our opinions on the matter, here comes my look back at some of the stuff from our year...

eddie's football career is up and running - he plays in goal for the yorkshire amateurs u11 colts (effectively the 'B' team) and loves it. and as a result i have morphed into the sort of ranting-lunatic-touchline-parent that i used to view with such dismay and pity back when i was running schools' football teams (my new year's resolution will be to shut up whilst spectating - please hold me to it...) ed's on a run of three consecutive clean sheets at the mo (two nil-nils and a 2-0 victory) - a source of great pride...



eddie's also laying down some rock'n'roll foundations with guitar and keyboard lessons at school. today he played 'smoke on the water' solo in his assembly, and wore badly-applied eyeliner uncle-fester-style for the occasion. in the words of the lancashire hotpots, 'oh no, he's turned emo...'



meanwhile joe is the (possibly-self-appointed) captain of the school Y2 football team and shows all the signs of developing into a rangy midfield dynamo. he spends his free time running about kicking imaginary footballs and commentating (loudly) on the action. our tv watching is regularly interrupted by the sound of hammering feet and a triumphant shout of "KISNORBO!" from the hallway. both lads are sadly afflicted with the family allegiance to leicester city football club (who we've travelled to watch a couple of times - most notably back in april in barnsley, on the day when our 1-0 victory was enough to keep us up and leeds got relegated. heh heh...)



sue's work is going well, despite some local reorganisations which are due to change the structure of her department and, somewhere down the line, probably her job too. in the meantime she's looking at the possibility of training as an educational psychologist, and has cleared the first hurdle - with plenty more to come... watch this space.

greenbelt continues to be a highlight of the family year, and we're getting more involved as contributors each time. this year we took three life-size jesuses with us - not sure how well they worked actually, but the other things that we did - three large interactive-y maps of the site - worked a treat (especially this one)
highlights of the festival were the communal big-screen viewings of 'shaun the sheep' and the fantastic music bill (well done harv!) - billy bragg, kanda bongo man, duke special, soweto kinch, sara masen, kathryn williams...
we'll be back again next year, and i'm hoping to get more into the visual arts side of the festival, and maybe do something with 'proost' there too...

talking of whom, this year i've really enjoyed hooking up with jonny and jon @ proost.co.uk to sell some of the stuff that i've created for various alt worship and church-type purposes. including the advent stuff that i created with the blackburn diocese - another work-highlight of my year... that's the kind of work that i'd love to be doing more of in the new year - more art-y and less illustration-y, if that makes sense.

my new year's resolution (apart from the football-supporting-behaviour-improvement one) will be to do more culturally invigorating stuff - more cinema, more galleries, more theatre visits, more reading (and not just comics), more gigs...

we didn't get to the movies much this year, but i thought that 'this is england' was a really great film, with a top soundtrack. and i'm not even watching much tv these days, though 'heroes', 'lead balloon', 'the mighty boosh' and 'dr who' were all essential viewing... (happily, we managed to completely avoid watching 'x-factor' and anything with ballroom dancing or celebrities eating maggots in it...)

book-wise i really enjoyed two graphic novels by gipi this year - 'garage band' and 'notes for a war story' - well worth a look next time you're in ok comics*
and the charlie higson 'young bond' books have also been a big hit, with me and eddie enjoying them equally as the bedtime read...
sue meanwhile highly recommends 'so many ways to begin' by jon macgregor

finally, my top ten songs from the past year (in no particular order)...

'your english is good' by tokyo police club (you gotta love that squonky keyboard riff)
'either way' by the twang
'505' by the arctic monkeys
'november starlings' by trembling blue stars
'weird fishes/arpeggi' by radiohead
'how long' by calamateur vs steve lawson
'tonight the streets are ours' by richard hawley
'my favourite book' by stars
'sunday' by bloc party
and
'brother' by annuals


so then, happy christmas!
see you in the new year...

si


(*other comic stores are, apparently, available...)

limping across the line and doing the best with what we've got...

i have just emailed out my last few roughs at the end of what feels like a marathon 12 months of work. no more deadlines now until the new year...

and the past few weeks have been a real struggle - in hindsight i've not really recovered from the effort expended on the advent thing [see previous post] and for a couple of weeks i've been on the verge of succumbing to man-flu without ever actually getting properly ill... [maybe it's seasonally affected disorder. or maybe sue's right and i'm just a hypochondriac...]

when i'm run down like this work becomes a right old struggle - when i'm drawing, things that i'd normally do without thinking suddenly stop happening and i end up correcting and re-drafting just to get things correctly proportioned and stuff... all very irritating.

then there's the ongoing frustrations of our building project... i've not blogged about it much, partly because i really don't want this journal to become a big moan-fest [no, really] and partly because the best way of coping with the whole messy business has been just to try not to think about it too much. so, without going into unecessary detail, my new studio/office is still nowhere near finished over a year after work on it began... [sigh]

but then this morning bloc party came up on the macbook's iTunes - there's a sequence of three tunes off of their last album ['kreuzberg', 'i still remember' and 'sunday'] which is just brilliant; the sort of slightly euphoric, anthemic, uplifting stuff that i am a complete sucker for. 'sunday' in particular is great - a lovely, sort-of-clumsy love song... a reminder that life is good, that it's sometimes the small things that can mean the most, that there is so much to be thankful for and to be hopeful about... sometimes you just have to lift your head and look up to see it.



and here's the finished version of one of those maths illustrations...

the walk-through advent calendar...

the walk-through advent calendar that i mentioned in the last post seemed to go quite well.

i probably blogged about it last year, but basically the idea is quite simple - 25 little stations, each of which looks at one character or place or item from the christmas story (mary, joseph, the magi, bethlehem, the gifts, the star etc etc...) and a cafe serving festive foodstuffs. folk volunteer in advance to create the stations, and when it's all up and running, you go round and 'do' the stations like you'd open the doors on an advent calendar, exploring the advent/christmas story in the process.

for this year's event we used st margaret's, an old and disused church in burley which is about to be brought back to life as an arts and conference centre called 'leftbank leeds'... it's a brilliant space, and once it's resurrected it'll be a truly amazing venue, but at the mo there's no heating or lighting or power in there, and - we discovered - it leaks quite badly in places...!
so it was a mammoth effort to set up and run - me and G and lloydy must have each spent about 17 hours in there over the weekend - and we paid out an awful lot to (partially) heat the place and to hire the cardigan centre next door for the use of it's toilets...

as ever, people were really creative and inventive with their stations, and we had some very positive feedback from both contributors and visitors (including five coppers who popped in for a nosey). if i can get ahold of some images of the event i'll post them up here (i took our camera, but somewhat predictably forgot to take any photos with it...)

it's always a fantastic and worthwhile thing to do, but it's also an exhausting event to co-ordinate (so i think that next year it might just be someone else's turn to curate it...!)

why i've been away a while...

my lovely agent has been keeping me busy of late - not least with fifteen images for a maths project which i've been working on for the past month and is now almost finished...















meantime this weekend is the advent event @ st margaret's/leftbank leeds...

and the advent calendar thing is still downloadable from proost via the link on the right there [it's in the 'books' section]...

advent resources...

this evening, something of mine has become a jonny baker worship trick! [you have no idea how chuffed i am about this!]

i've posted a few of the images that i created for the blackburn diocese's advent resource pack on here before, but if you want to get ahold of a copy of the whole comic and also the flatpack models that i drew, nip across to the proost site [there's a link on the right there] where they're available for downlaod [£3.50 each for the comic pages and the models]

upcoming

persepolis, and big award news...

there's a line in one of my favourite Spearmint songs ['say something else'] where they state that a film is "never, ever, EVER as good as the book". well, last night sue and i went out [blimey, it was almost like having a social life again...:) ] and saw a movie that might just be the exception that proves that particular rule - 'persepolis'...
it was the opening film in this year's leeds international film festival - the lord mayor was there an everything - and it was really, really good - funny, moving, chilling and beautifully animated [the movie, not the mayor]. well worth seeking out if it's showing near you somewhere... [and if you're in leeds, they're showing it in the town hall this weekend i think...] failing that, get ahold of the books, as they are equally fantastic.

other news - a book that i illustrated has won an award!
i don't think that my contribution had much to do with it, to be honest, but it's always nice to be associated with success...

talking of awards - our favourite shop ever in leeds, the majestic ok comics, just won the 'retail legend' award in the annual leeds guide Retail Therapy awards - a richly deserved victory in our book... congrats to jared and all involved - pay 'em a visit if you're in town...

more people drawn from on the bus...

drawing things that you observe from a bus window is odd because you don't get to see them from a static viewpoint - you're usually moving past them quite quickly, and you don't get long to really scrutinize them. you have to act/think a bit like a camera and fix their image in your mind and then scribble down what you saw almost as soon as they're gone...

lately i've been getting a bit frustrated when i've done this or any other sort of observational drawing - feeling like i've lost it a bit, that i'm not nearly as good at it as i once was. partly that's down to practice, but also on the bus into leeds yesterday, when i really thought about it, actually my drawing is ok, it's the art of looking that i need to rediscover...

ed'n'liz

sketched on the bus into leeds last night...

the ten most-played songs with 'love' in the title in my macbook's iTunes music folder...

10 'john lennon love' - duke special
9 'all is full of love' - death cab for cutie
8 'crazy love' - van morrison
7 'love is a series of scars' - duke special
6 'seekers who are lovers' - cocteau twins
5 'only love can set you free' - american music club
4 'love is' - american music club
3 'last night i dreamt that somebody loved me' - the smiths
2 'someday you will be loved' - death cab for cutie
1 'broken loves' - the blue nile...

art v craft... [part 1]

...every now and again, someone will tell me that i have a wonderful job, that it must be great to be paid to exercise my creativity. now i'm not one to moan [no, really] but most of the time what i'm required to do is quite tightly briefed and there are [very sensible] limits to what i'm allowed to draw. sometimes, like any job, it can be really quite dull. it's commercial art, except, maybe it's not really art. it's more craft. most days i'm a craftsman more than an artist.

that's not to devalue what i do, or the work that i take on. sometimes though, i feel like i want - for want of a better phrase - to make art. to do stuff that's less functional, more thoughtful, less about solving a compositional problem, and more about asking questions... or telling a story.
...something that has a bit of depth to it.

things like '40', or stuff that we do for greenbelt, or comicbook stories that i've kept on the backburner for a while now, or lino cuts, stuff inspired and informed by our experiences in alternative worship and emergent church; but i struggle to eke out the time to work on those sort of projects - and then there's the financial issue - can you make the art stuff pay...? and if so, how? i've got loads of ideas and projects and things that i'd love to get to stuck into, but in the meantime i've a wife, two kids and a builder to support... and plenty of commissioned work to keep me busy...

[so, as i say, i'm not moaning, just pondering...!]

meantime, on the desk lately [includes robots]...

...if i had time today, these are the things that i would post about...

...art vs craft...
...the central heating which is going in to our new extension bathroom bit today...
...what i would do if i had a radio show of my very own...
...my kids' sporting prowess...
...eddie and slipknot...
...my imac's showing signs of senility...
...why gideon coe is great...
...standing on a touchline screaming nonsense at uncomprehending kids...
...choosing a secondary school for eddie...
...the top ten tunes with 'love' in the title in my iTunes library...
...robots.

dank

it's autumn. yesterday here in our little bit of north leeds it was dank. not wet or rainy or anything, just a bit grey and very definitely dank.
and today it has absolutely yacked it down.*

i'm working on some sample illustrations for a job that includes a robot. the client asked if i'd drawn robots before, and so i started looking back through the archives for this book, which i illustrated a decade ago. i was pleasantly surprised by some of the stuff that i'd done for it... here are some robotic samples taken from it's pages...






...and here are a couple of more recent robots from various jobs...




*UPDATE: this afternoon it suddenly turned all lovely and 'season-of-mellow-fruitful-ish'... weird.

...seeing stars...

on tuesday i was out with ed and liz and co to see stars at the brudenell.

stars are canadian, and great - and they didn't disappoint... the high spots were 'ageless beauty' [even though singer amy's voice went part way through], 'reunion' and 'your ex-lover is dead' off the last album, though the new stuff sounded good too.

imho their current album ['in our bedroom after the war'] isn't quite as immediate and hook-laden as it's predeccesor ['set yourself on fire'], but it's definitely a grower...
i was talking recently with someone about how when you reach a certain age, all new music is doomed to disappoint because when you listen to it all you can hear is what else it sounds like - with that in mind 'in our bedroom...' has big chunks of prefab sprout and scritti politti in there [both name-checked in the sleevenotes too] and also sounds quite reminiscent of the delgados at times...

so - stars - well worth checking out if you've never heard of 'em before...


meantime, on the desk this week...

happy birthday, simon hall...

last weekend we dumped the kids with friends for sleepovers and headed off to arkengarthdale [conjuring up images of tinker's rucksack- "it's not all walking!"] and a night away in a rather fine inn.

the occasion was simon hall's 40th birthday celebrations.

i first met simon when we shared a house in oxford one brief summer back in the late eighties, and we hooked back up with him and his family when we moved up here... we also joined revive, which is the baptist community that simon founded and led for many years. most of the really great things about revive are attributes which it shares with simon - creativity, vulnerability, honestly, humour, open-ness, thoughtfulness, generosity, reflective-ness, a degree of organisational and administritive chaos [!], humility, warmth, intelligence, a big-heartedness, a love of music... he's a unique and remarkable bloke, in so many ways...

on the saturday evening we shared a meal with sixty-odd other guests; speeches were made, songs were sung [simon covered low's 'when i go deaf' - top stuff] and wine and beer and champagne were consumed. it was a lovely evening.

a book was passed around too, with an invitation to write a message to simon - i'm useless when those things come round; my mind goes blank, so i ended up just adding my name to sue's entry... i'd really have liked to put something more meaningful, so maybe i'll do it here - simon, you're an amazing bloke and it's a privilege to be numbered amongst your friends... happy birthday mate!

good day/bad day...

yesterday was terrible.

firstly i didn't start with the monastic prayer thing that we've committed to in our little group. i'm not sure if the prayer invokes god's presence, or whether it's about inviting him/her in, or if it's a reminder to me to seek god out in stuff [like a setting of my focus for the day ahead] maybe it's all of those things. but when i don't open up the working day with that time of prayer things often don't sit right from there on...

it actually started ok - i heard a track from lawson's latest opus on his blog, and decided to buy the album on itunes. it's really great [but don't tell him i said that, obviously] - a collaboration with a guy called calamateur - with all the usual noodly space-bass noises plus added acousticy guitar and singing. it's a bit martin grech, a bit adem... 'how long' and 'endo' are standout tracks, and it's going to rival dakota suite as my late-nite listening from now on...

but then work dragged. and builder dan rang to say that he couldn't come today to work on the extension bathroom bit [he had a valid excuse - nursing his injured child]... which means yet more delays, when we'd hoped to have that little bit at least finished for the weekend...
then my work started to go even worse - and i started feeling a bit ill [eddie's got a cold and i think that i'm fighting it off]

and then, on top of all that, just as i was thinking about packing up for the day, i got an email at asking for some roughs which i'd not got ready yet. they were due yesterday - i'd just not read the brief properly, and not registered the correct deadline for the roughs. stupid stupid stupid.
so i ended up ringing big ed to bail out on my ticket for the [sold out] rosie taylor project/iliketrains gig at the very last minute and instead sat up 'till gone midnight drawing roughs. sometimes i really hate my job.

here's one of the roughs that kept me up into the small hours... i'm actually quite pleased with it...




still, today has been ok - got my DACS claim in and almost caught up with the ongoing job that dragged so badly yesterday.

other news - earlier in the week i did get out in the evening to a meeting about possibly networking with other christian artists and creative types up here in leeds. came away enthused and quite energised by the folks who showed up - some amazingly talented people there - but wondering about what direction the thing will take, and whether i'll fit the remit. lots of talk about 'the industry', meaning music/media/arts/fashion, but it dawned on me quite early on in the evening that if i'm a part of any industry, then it's probably publishing, which has a very different vibe... anyhow, i'm committed to going along next time the group meets, so i'll keep you posted...

...still gleaming

it's not the real jules rimet, of course.
but that orange ball there on the right?
that's the genuine article.


[photo courtesy of paul cookson!]

not-very-good catch-up post...

so it's been busy-ness as usual round here these past few weeks, but there's a relative lull in the offing, a return to normal work-hours, the chance of some time with the family, a rumour of rest and down-time. [oh yes!]

so - last friday i was invited to lancaster for a headteacher's conference which also saw the launch of the advent resource that i've been working on with lisa and craig and co at the blackburn diocese. [see previous posts] i had a great time - paul cookson [top poet] and roly baines [clergyman clown] were performing and talking there too, and several folk came up and said some nice stuff about '40' and how they'd used it in their schools...

then, after the conference, cookson dragged me off to the football museum in preston where he is poet in residence.
i've never been before, and it's a great place. paul was going there to have some publicity shots taken for an exhibition of poetry that he's curating there this month - and so we ended up with the ball from the '66 world cup final - the actual hurst hat-trick ball!

i wasn't allowed to touch it of course - white cotton gloves had to be worn by the museum staff transporting it to and from its display case. but i got close enough...
as an artefact it's actually almost disappointing - murky orange coloured, a little shrivelled and a bit shabby round the edges [insert your own david dickinson/judith chalmers joke here] - but it carries so much meaning, it's such a special thing... [and the only signature on it that hasn't faded away completely is uri geller's. what's that all about then?] it was a real privilege to be allowed so close to it.

a photo of me and said ball was snapped - i'll post it if i can get ahold of it - just to prove that i was there...

in the meantime, if you're interested in the advent resource, email me and i'll put you in touch with lisa, as copies of the dvd will be available for purchase, i think... [end of plug]

on the desk lately [artwork for simple animations for a phonics teaching programme...]

greenbelt pics...

...i'm not being narcissistic or owt, but if you go here there's a rather fetching shot of me and mr steve lawson frowning at one another by the tiny tea tent at greenbelt.

and here is a picture of me looking quite manly (no, really) carrying something large and impressive.

and here are steve collins' photos of one of the big map thingys that we did for the festival this year [see earlier posts]...

steve and toni...

my little brother got married last week!

petition

a petition well worth signing - http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Iraqi-Employees/

for more details, visit http://danhardie.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/we-cant-turn-them-away/

proost...

...Greenbelt also saw the relaunch of jon birch and jonny baker's rather excellent 'proost' website.

www.proost.co.uk

they sell all sorts of great creative resources for churches and worshipping communities, and they have a couple of my things on there - '40' [now sold out in it's cd-rom format] and a thing that i did exploring the beattitudes for an open space service up here a while back. they're both downloadable for the princely sum of £1.99 each - bargain!

however, if you want an even bigger bargain, you can buy a year's subscription for £60, which entitles you to all the downloadable content already available on the site, plus everything else added in the next twelve months. jon and jonny are committed to putting new stuff up every month, so it's well worth the investment...

i'd recommend jon's 'twelve stations' and 'garbage garbage' movies, and the 'spirit of the new' album for starters...

[end of plug!]

Greenbelt

we're back from Greenbelt.

for the uninitiated, Grenbelt is a christian Arts festival, held on the racecourse in Cheltenham, and it's been going for about 35 years now [don't know the exact figure, but i have vague memories that it celebrated it's thirtieth year a few summers back...]

i went a couple of times as a teenager - cliff richard [yay!] headlined one of those festivals, and i also remember standing next to half of depeche mode in a queue for pizza, and arriving on site the day after a very youthful U2 had turned up unexpectedly and played support to garth hewitt. i can also remember the dj peter powell in ridiculously skimpy shorts presenting a radio1 special from the mainstage... ah, the eighties... then i found other stuff to fill my summers with and didn't go again for years.

anyhow, since we've been up north, a weekend at the festival has become a landmark in our year - revive have always been into Greenbelt in a big way, and so in the weeks and months ahead of the bank holiday we're making stuff to contribute to the arts and/or worship programme.
and then the weekend of the festival itself has come to signify the beginning of the end of the holidays for us and the kids. once we're home it's all about getting ready for the new term [for both sue and the boys...]


if i'm honest, last year i succumbed to curmudgeonliness and as a result didn't have the greatest of times, so i was determined to enjoy it this time round. and this year was really great.

the weather was fantastic all weekend for a start!
and recently eddie and joe have suddenly latched onto music and started developing their own tastes - so we spent some time ahead of the festival checking out myspace and listening to some of the bands due to play the festival. i was disappointed that rosie thomas was ill and couldn't make it, and i missed denison witmer because joe wanted to see andy yorke and the timings clashed, but sarah masen, kathryn williams, nizar al-issa, kanda bongo man and soweto kinch were all excellent, and duke special and billy bragg were both absolutely superb.

other highlights included paul cookson and stewart henderson's annual 'tickling in public' show which just seems to get better every year, lloydy filling in as billy bragg's guitar tech/tea-maker, and shaun the sheep on the big screen [even more enjoyable when watched communally]

it was also good to meet up with some good folk again - dave walker [if only fleetingly], ian and gail, steve and lis and harv, kevin and lucy, chris goan, and matt and donna [and sam and noah]...

we took down three large maps, which seemed to work pretty well - especially the one with the little papier mache figures of performers on it [see below] - though the three jesus figures that we made didn't work quite as well as i'd hoped - maybe sue was right when she said that they should have been displayed together rather than in different venues around the site... ah well, you live and learn...


overall though, perhaps the greatest thing about Greenbelt is the good-natured and friendly atmosphere of the whole thing - on the last night i got chatting to a stall-holder who told me that of all the events that they'd done this summer, Greenbelt was by far the loveliest in terms of the punters' behaviour and the lack of hassle - she told me that if they weren't working the festival next year she and her husband would be back as paying customers, which i think says something about the event. we let eddie go off round the site with his mate sam every day - can't think that we'd feel happy giving him that much license to roam at any other festivals...


[here are some snaps - the figures that we made, lloydy being techy and brewing up for billy bragg, the great man himself, and duke special - sorry for the picture quality - eddie has yet to master the camera, but there's a certain arty murkiness to them that we quite like...! there are, of course, much better shots from the festival on the official website if you want to go browse there - the link's on the right...]

Dumfries & Galloway

just back from a much-needed holiday - staying near Castle Douglas in Dumfries & Galloway.
it's a top place if the weather's ok [and fortunately it was] - relatively undiscovered with loads of places to visit and things to do.
these snaps were taken at Portpatrick [on the far south west tip of Scotland if you want to look it up on a map]






and now it's off to greenbelt...!