Portrait of Ed Miliband

Sophie Heawood in today's Guardian - It’s the age of the geek – so why does Ed Miliband still get such a bad press?  (here)

A portrait of my Papa

The only Zen you'll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you - Alan Watts

(mountain print available from Society6 here)

One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil - Ingres

I found David Hockney's book Hidden Knowledge in the library last week and I've been pouring over it ever since. My understanding of art history tends to be quite patchy but I find it endlessly fascinating to learn about. Hockney's examination of the Old Master's and their (possible) use of optics is a good way in, and whether or not you agree with his conclusions it is an opportunity to examine the work by these artists more closely - as well as chronologically, side by side with their peers, which gives a little more context and room for comparison.

(Incidentally, I've also been captivated by the BBC series Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities)

Some recent drawings from my sketchbook:

Drawn from Ingres' portrait of Mrs Charles Badham (1816) 

Ingres focused most of his energy into drawing his subject's faces - they are drawn so tightly that you can barely see the individual pencil marks, the modelling of the face is often light and sensitive - while the clothes are drawn with more looseness of expression - harder strokes, stronger lines - still maintaining a strong focus on line and contour. This effect draws your eye to the face - it appears more in focus than the rest of the drawing - while the looseness keeps your eye engaged in the drawing as a whole.

drawn from Rembrandt's portrait of Baartjen Martens

(self-portrait with hair in towel)

It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas - Paul Cezanne

A comic about the fear of the blank canvas. How ideas hide in the blank page like albino animals in snow. How ideas are predatory; the bigger, quicker, more beautiful ideas quickly taking out the slower, smaller ideas.

Ideas flow through like these beautiful little fish, and you catch them - David Lynch

Some ideas arrive the moment you stop looking for them.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm - Goethe

I'll be posting new comics here: http://www.patreon.com/emmaridgway

Print Giveaway

Comment below, or visit Facebook to Like and Share the post here to be in with the chance of winning one of my A5 snail prints. 

Printed on 225gsm Somerset Enhanced Moab by Legion Paper and packaged in a protective cellophane sleeve.
(The winner will be picked at random from a hat on Sunday 16th February)

Heart of Darkness

I've been immersed in Heart of Darkness over the past months, analysing the text and various criticisms, researching African art, learning about Joseph Conrad and his life, filling a sketchbook with drawings and notes...

These are some of the illustrations I made:

This is from a part of the book where the steamboat is described as being like a grimy beetle crawling the floor of a lofty portico. The sense of scale is immense. The Europeans are so small in their little boat and so disconnected from the vast culture and nature around them. Drawn in brush pen, mapping pen, rapidograph, and ink wash sprinkled with salt (while listening to an Alan Watts lecture).

I really wanted to play more with different viewpoints...this illustration is from the part where Marlow wanders into the "grove of death" where the exhausted slaves are dying under the trees. He notices a piece of white worsted tied around the neck of one of the slaves, and wonders what on earth this piece of material from European shores is doing in the Congo, and what it means for it to be around his neck.

Conrad describes the knitter's dress in Chapter 1 as being made from a plain fabric like umbrella material...in my illustration I've taken a few liberties and given it a "rained on" quality. I think the idea is that they are impervious; nothing can stop the progress of their knitting. They are the Fates, possessing power over everyone who passes through their chamber, measuring out their lives in black wool.

Conrad imagined the universe as an infernal knitting machine:

“There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold”. Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is – and it is indestructible!
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.”                              
                                                                              - Joseph Conrad

(speculative cover design based on the character of the Harlequin and a colonial map of Africa)

Winter Sketchbook

I recently got a Pentel Brush Pen and I've been using it for location drawings. It's much more expressive than the rapidograph or mapping pen, and pretty handy for creating spontaneous drawings while out and about.

My brother Sean

People in a café

A very bad drawing of my brother Lewis, which makes us both giggle

Scarf on an office chair

A pot of tea

Vaslav Nijinsky

Just a couple of drawings I did of Nijinsky for my own amusement, straight from photographs of him.
I've been reading about his life, which the ballet critic Richard Buckle once described as: 

"ten years of growth, ten years of learning, ten years of dancing, thirty years of darkness."

Portrait Commission

part of a set of portraits commissioned by a lovely client in New York

Lou Reed

When I was little, Transformer was our staple record for long car journeys (along with David Bowie's Hunky Dory) - me and my brother's knew it off by heart, back to front, upside down, and never, ever grew tired of it. Our toy monkey's sang along to "Make-up" through many a rain-swept voyage into darkest Wales, delighted to come out of their closets, bom-bom-bom-bom bombombom.

Later, when I was 17, clumsy and shy, somehow sent floundering after the death of my grandmother and my first visit to New York (one freezing February, central park pristine with snow and bare trees), I listened to a cassette of Lou Reed's New York album on repeat, kept afloat amid a sea of the mean-seventeens (possibly not helped by reading Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted in quick succession).

My portrait of Lou Reed is now available printed on t-shirts at WeAdmire. 

"I can't express anger. That's my problem. I internalize everything. I just grow a tumor instead."

A postcard sized portrait of Woody Allen, 

sketched in ink with a paintbrush

(drawn for a sketchathon with Little White Lies Magazine)

Nana

a portrait of my Nana

David Icke & Ted Heath

David Icke's fateful meeting with Ted Heath (open in new window for larger view)

Based on a curious quote at the end of this article in The Independent:

"I once had an extraordinary experience with former 

prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, 

including the whites, turned jet black and I seemed 

to be looking into two black holes."

- David Icke

The Guardian, 2006

New Empress: The Violence in Silence

We've just got the new issue of New Empress in the post - now A4 sized, printed in b&w, with a glossy cover for the Silent Film Special. My illustration for Helen Cox's article "Slap That Baby Make Him Freak: The Violence in Silence" (about violence directed towards babies in silent-era films) was of a train about to hit a pram. I wasn't sent the article to work from (the brief was just to have a pram in a precarious situation) but oddly enough one of the first examples of infant-directed violence mentioned in the article involves a pram hit by an oncoming train. 

(Please note that no babies were harmed in the creation of this illustration.)

I also made a colour version too:

Dan filmed me drawing today

"To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or prose" - Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I'm working on a large scale portrait of my friend's parents...

r-e-a-c-h