also, these... :-)

Paul Thomas Saunders - Silhouettes Of An English Rose by Paul Thomas Saunders

The Hands of the Wrong People - 'You're Not Singing Anymore' from The Hands of the Wrong People on Vimeo.

my favourite five tunes of 2011

[of course, by tomorrow i'll have completely changed my mind and chosen a different five...]

coming soon...

a new comic, available in the new year.

also, a new printing project or two for 2012, and a bit more activity on this blog, hopefully.

have a great christmas and a happy new year!

hot off the desk[top]

more nice job-ness

nice job...

...which i'll maybe post more of later :-)

advent thing...

a quick last-day-of-november plug for the advent thingy that ian adams and i have done for proost.

you can get it here for the bargain price of just £3.50...



for that you get 25 images of advent people places and things, each with a little reflection to get you thinking...

on the desk lately...

PNE fans may wish to look away...



this is from a booklet produced to celebrate the 'writing wrongs' Streetspeak project. it's a football and poetry-based thing that's been nice to work on. it's a great project too...


talking of poetry and footy, here's a page from a comic that i'm working on with paul cookson, due out early in the new year...



[click the image to bigify it]

work in progress...

a tiny snippet of something i've been working on this week...

good news and an imminent price hike

Yay! good news!

the craft centre and design gallery in leeds will soon be stocking some of my bus trip prints :-)

the bad news is that i'm going to have to hike up the prices in my etsy store as a result.
so that gives you this weekend to get on and buy them online whilst they're still cheap!
use the code LEEDSBUS66 in the etsy store and you get a 20% discount...

banksy

just to prove that i am doing stuff at the mo [though in truth, work is a bit slow coming in right now]...



...here's a rough photoshop sketch of gordon banks, done in preparation for a possible future project...

talking in church and cardigan arts triangle news...

my everyday working life is quiet solitary, and most of my thinking is internalised - i don't really have to explain myself much, or think on my feet. most of the time here it's just me and the pencils and the coffee pot and 6music or itunes.
so whilst getting out occasionally to talk about what i do is undoubtedly averygoodthing, it's also a bit daunting...

my 'leeds resurrection' pics have been on display in a local church recently, and so the other sunday i was invited along to be interviewed about them, and it was great. sue was there, and she told me that i didn't make a fool of myself, which is always a relief [and, from sue, very high praise indeed...]
people seemed interested in the work, and there were some good questions; and it's always a good thing to be made to think about your work.
it was nice to see those images again, to be challenged about aspects of them and to be excited by them again.

then last sunday i took part in the annual cardigan arts triangle day. it's an afternoon in a small area of headingley when local residents open up their houses and invite artists to display their work in there. i was invited to show my stuff at the tapper's home, and apart from a couple of incidents of blu-tac theft, they were the perfect hosts :-)
like an idiot i didn't take any photos, but here's a couple of pics that i stole from lee jackson's twitter feed...


[the figure lurking in the background is lynne tapper]
after a slow start, we had good numbers showing up; some really good conversations, a few very complimentary remarks, and some sales. it was a great thing to have been a part of and i'll definitely be doing it again next year [if invited!]

the bus trips project seemed to grab people's imaginations, and i got asked a few times what my next project was going to be.

and i've been thinking about that - it's been nice this year not to have the background noise of the printing project going on, but i am starting to miss it, if i'm honest.

so - as a memo to myself as anything - here's a few ideas that i'm toying with...

1. a leeds alphabet. i'll spend some time in and around the city drawing letters and bits of nice font-age that i can find [there's some amazing little bits of architectural stuff going on in leeds if you look for it] and compile an alphabet of individual linoprinted letters from those observations.

2. i'm 45. it always bugged me that i didn't do anything specific to celebrate my 33-and-a-third birthday, and i don't want to have to wait till my 78th [if i make it that far] so this seems like a good year to celebrate my collection of vinyl... i'm thinking of dusting off my old collection of 7 inch singles and selecting the top 40 to immortalise in print form. again, typography may well figure quite heavily.

3. something stupidly ambitious, and - again- music related, along the lines of seth's dominion city work or anthony green's 'resurrection' sculptural painting... only a bit quirkier, with more papier mache [and not as great as either of those things]...

on the greenbelt blog...

our wild thing prints are on the greenbelt blog...

thank you, david dark :-)

so the talk at st edmunds went ok last night. i don't think that i said anything too dumb, so that counts as a big result in my book :-)

in prep for the service though, i skimmed back through the opening chapter of david dark's 'everyday apocalypse' [i thought that a question of Christian Art vs. art made by christians might have come up, and dark has some good things to say about that.]

anyway, just re-reading the bits in the book that i'd underlined was kind-of-thrilling - i'd forgotten just what a great book it is, and how important it had been to me the first time i'd read it...

here's a selection -

"We were made for something better than we're getting and whatever it is we're settling for..."

"The present work concerns itself with all manner of media that highlights, exposes or lampoons the moral bankruptcy of our imaginations while teasing us toward a better way of looking at, and dwelling within, the world..."

"i'm grateful for and in dire need of whatever art can keep me awake and alive to the mystery, whatever keeps me paying attention, whatever reminds me that none of us (and no ideology) are possessors of the final say..."

"to reimagine the now is our work and our pleasure. look hard. it is at hand..."

people of leeds: a date for your diaries...

i'll be interviewed about art and stuff in the service at st edmunds church in roundhay this sunday evening, KO 6.30pm.
they have my leeds resurrection pics on display in there at the mo...
can't guarantee that i'll make much sense, but david the vicar there is great, so even if my answers are rubbish, at least you know that the questions will be interesting :-)

and i think that there'll be a Q&A time, so you'll get the chance to ask me what my favourite colour is, and where i get my ideas from... :-)

the gang

just realised i never posted it, but i made and took these little wild things figures to Greenbelt to help decorate the Hub info desk.
originally they were going to be part of an animation project we were going to run, but that never came to pass.

at the end of the weekend the various members of the gang were all re-homed, each one going away with a deserving someone who'd put in a shift on the visual arts side of things this year...

luke leighfield and jose vanders

this is a rather lovely version of a great tune and you can have it for free.

go grab a copy...

finished print

the finished versions of the blue mary m print from that last post.

i feel like i've somewhat belatedly hit on something with the lino printing - whereas before i was often transcribing the line of my pencil drawings onto the block, in the past few prints i'm using shapes and solid areas of colour to build the images.

this print is of course available to purchase in my etsy store.
you can still use the code LEEDSBUS66 there to get a 10% discount on anything in my shop...

more lino-printing work in process pics...

three-colour blue Mary M print, with the two blue layers drying, and one sample printing of the final black layer just to try it out...

my desk is a mess. needs tidying, badly :-)

harry baker as max, beginning the wild rumpus at GB11

lino cut wild things...

following up on that last post...

one of the things that we did in the hub at greenbelt this year was to make lino prints of wild things [i posted about it here a while back...]



we got punters to cut a block of either a head, body or legs and then to choose the remaining body parts from a growing selection of blocks cut by me [in advance] and their fellow greenbelters to make complete wild things.



here are some composite pics of wild things showing every block cut during the festival [we had more bodies than legs being cut, and way more heads than both put together, hence some body parts appear quite often...]




some of them are really very good indeed.



which is your favourite?

greenbelt

so last year, after greenbelt, i promised updates and reflections which never came. sorry about that, but basically GB10 was good, with the highlight being meeting up with tom hollander and james wood, the men behind the tv show 'rev'. i'd made the first contact which resulted in them coming to greenbelt, and thankfully it was a hugely popular and successful moment in the festival - i've been basking in the glory of their big-top appearance ever since... :-)

so then- onto GB11. i was basically responsible for programming visual arts things in the Hub tent. this year we themed it all to maurice sendak's classic 'where the wild things are' children's book and if you click the links you can see some of our lino printing and general wild-thing rumpus-making. the rumpus was possibly my all-time greenbelt highlight - due in large part to the various talents of harry baker who wrote a poem especially for the event and led the whole thing, rhys cowe, jay and claire - who made masks with punters and generally set the whole exuberant tone of the thing - and simon emery, who created an immaculate installation of max's room from where the whole thing was set in motion... it was a blast.

greenbelt is a place of extremes for me - it's so wildly different from my day-to-day sat here at my desk, where i'm fairly solitary and self-contained. on the racecourse it's busy, very busy - i'm running about sorting stuff left, right and centre, and there are people to deal with everywhere. so at various points during the course of the festival you'll catch me at my most rantingly misanthropic and also being engagingly sociable and generous - it brings out the best and worst in me... but i wouldn't miss it for the world. it's the most hope-filled place on the planet and i love it.

King for a Day from Mark Waddington on Vimeo.

as ever, i missed almost everything that i wanted to see and hear there, but of the stuff i did manage to do my highlights included skiving off from the big sunday service to meet up with stevie B, moira, ian, steve and andrea; the wild rumpus; people surprising themselves with just how well their lino prints came out; two great sessions of pecha kucha; meeting simone lia [and managing to not embarrass myself too much in the process]; luke leighfield in the underground venue; billy bragg's encore of tank park salute and a new england [i'd missed the rest of his set]; pies from pieminister; the methodist art collection, which is breathtakingly good; a slightly tiddly conversation with mike r, del and grace; willie williams' lumia domestica; and my wife and kids who i know are brilliant but who still manage to surprise and amaze me...

chicken...

here's two things that i'm pleased with.

a chicken - a woodcut of a bird originally drawn in the goan's garden in dunoon [we'd highly recommend it as a holiday vacation] and, somewhat appropriately [and completely by accident] a portrait of simon peter.
he's based on the character i drew in those leeds resurrection pics a while back, and i'm hoping that he'll feature in something else that simon hall and i are working intermittently on at the mo...

both prints are available in my revamped etsy store...

more new prints...

so here are a few lino prints that i've made based on drawings done on widemouth beach back in june...

there's seven in the series, but a few of them haven't worked so well. these have come out ok though :-)

i've got a couple of sets of all seven to give away so if you want one, leave a comment. the first two'll get a set.

:-)

here come the politicians...

so now the fires are out and the rioting has stopped [for the mo]
here in leeds there were a couple of half-hearted attempts to get some aggro going, but thankfully nothing really developed.

and now that things have calmed, out come our elected representatives to explain it all to us...
last nite i watched sayeeda warsi and diane abbott bickering on newsnight, and it was an unedifying sight.

the established tactics seem to be - for the tories: state and re-state that the rioters are criminals and scumbags and need locking up, if anyone tries to talk about the underlying reasons for the mayhem accuse them of making excuses for it and condoning criminality, unless the reasons are poor parenting, years of political correctness and the policies of new labour, in which case those are all good reasons and let's discuss those at great length.

for labour: talk about how this sort of thing only ever happens under the tories, talk about the cuts as much as possible, state and restate that the rioters are criminals and not to be condoned then re-state it, then talk about the cuts again.

and so it'll go on. it's hard to escape the conclusion that our mp's first instinct is to work an angle, to try and manipulate the debate to the best advantage of their party and to discredit their opponents, rather than to genuinely engage with the issues and work together to sort things out and make things better. so many of them seem to serve their party first and us a distant second...
this morning a tory mp on the tv talked about the extra officers on duty in the capital "that david cameron organised". it's all just PR and spin...


meanwhile, as the politicians bicker and point the finger teams of local people are coming together with brooms to sweep up and try and put things back together again...

exclusive dad'n'lad prints for sale!

so after much pestering, all six of the prints that i made of jonah's drawings are done, signed and ready to go.

and here they are, all signed and numbered by him [he's insisting that he's the artist. i'm just the hired hand...]

they're all printed in acrylic and water-based inks on off-white 80gsm japanese paper, and the image size on each is approx 150x210mm...

they're all for sale - 12 quid each [p&p included] or £45 for a set of all six...
we're splitting the proceeds as he's got an eye on an mp3 player he wants to buy before the greenbelt festival at the end of the month.
[it appears that we have spawned a capitalist]

email me if you're interested!

[they'll also be up in my etsy shop when i can get around to sorting that out...]

alex and clyde

we're back from a week away in Dunoon - more about that later if i get the time - and i'm straight back to work.
[it's my fault - should've done these before we went!]

these two images are for this book - which will be ace. make sure you pre-order a copy :-)

two more prints...

...again taken direct from drawings left by jonah in my sketchbooks.

the gold one looks a bit gil-scott-heron-like to me, though i doubt joe knows who GSH is...

the green one is a drawing of me, i think, and has turned out very brian biggsy [which can only be a good thing]



apologies for the poor quality of the photos - i'm using photo booth and it's hard to get the lighting right :-(

jonah's drawings as new prints...

so for a long time now, jonah's been nicking my sketchbook to alleviate the boredom of car journeys and educational trips to galleries [etc.] and filling the pages with these random doodle-sketches of faces and heads. and they're really, really good.

so for a while now i've been talking with him about turning them into lino prints...

today i had a bit of space in the schedule and so finally got around to cutting and printing the first two [with at least three more to follow when i get the chance]

and here they are...