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!