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 :-)