You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming - Pablo Neruda

Spring has sprung! 

I've been experimenting with calligraphy and linoprint.

Illustration for Issue 5 of New Empress Magazine, available soon from the BFI shop

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Lately I've become obsessed with the work of Polish poster artist Tomasz Boguslawski - 

I love his economical use of objects, as well as the lighting, and the arrangement of the typography. He is able to raise these simple items (paper, scissors, dolls, mechanical parts...) to a level of beauty and imbue them with fresh purposes.

      

1. to move sideways. 2. to advance in an unobtrusive, furtive or coy way.

I'm looking for contributors to the first issue of Sidle zine.

Within illustration there is a fine tradition of social commentary, satire and reflection, and I'd like to bring together illustrators working in this way.

This is partly in response to a recent article in Creative Review "where is the content? where is the comment?" which takes the view that illustration has become an insular, self-indulgent craft, lacking engagement with political issues. 

The brief:

Create an illustration dealing with a contemporary issue which you feel strongly about.

Layout:

A4 dimensions, 300dpi

landscape or portrait (bearing in mind it will fold in centre to form an A5 booklet)

Colour or black and white (original colour pages will be uploaded to a blog while a paper copy will use black and white photocopies of these images, so bear in mind that your image/text will need to work well tonally)

Aside from that, it is completely open, and you can use whatever media/techniques you like.

I'd like to involve as many talented illustrators as possible - the more the merrier!

The final collected works will be displayed on a Sidle Zine blog with links to each contributor's web-site or blog, and a final printed edition of Sidle will be sent to Salford Zine Library

E-mail your contributions (or any questions or suggestions you might have) to: 

sidlezine@hotmail.co.uk

The deadline is: April 3rd 2012


After a few requests for more time, I have decided to extend the deadline


The new deadline is April 17th 2012

Murr

another illustration for The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr


From the cover sleeve: "Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser and brawler, and the moody, hypochondriac genius Kreisler. In his exuberant and bizarre novel, Hoffmann brilliantly evokes the fantastic, the ridiculous and the sublime within the humdrum bustle of daily life, making "The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr" (1820–22) one of the funniest and strangest novels of the nineteenth century."

"Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess" - Goethe

An illustration for New Empress Magazine for a review of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 

(pictured: Tom Wilkinson and Dame Maggie Smith)

Only given a day to create this but it was a nice opportunity to use colour. 

Never buy cheap tights.

Tomcat Murr

"Another difficult problem was dipping my pen in the ink well, for as I dipped it I couldn't contrive to keep my paw clean; it kept getting into the ink too, so the first few characters, written more with paw than the pen, were bound to be rather big and broad. Consequently, the ignorant might take my first manuscripts for little more than paper splashed with ink. "

- from The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann

"Can the idea of instinct as a blind involuntary urge be reconciled with the ability to dream?"

A terrible lack of blog posts, as I've been away masquerading as a receptionist for a couple of months whilst developing a voracious appetite for reading - at the moment: The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffman (which was written about 200 years ago but is funny and surprisingly fresh) and  The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom by Suzanne Buchan (fascinating insights into the Quays influences and working processes, as well as tiny snapshots of their early illustration work)

Anyway, I've just updated my website after about three years of letting the moss grow over it: 

http://www.emma-ridgway.co.uk/

(a drawing of Tomcat Murr from my sketchbook)

"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...

Can't Go Wrong Without You

"And illustration? What’s the point of arguing for a resistance in terms of "radical" expression. Illustrator!! Go turn into a bag of worms. Zero future, If they can sell Maikovski like cereal they’ll do it. All artistic capability stops when there’s an ounce of money to be made. All the tutti-frutti ragtail of flunkey editors, art directors, marketing heads, etc. . . . the more chronically conservative they are, the better they’ll rule and the longer they’ll rule. You’ll never stir skulls like these even with an oar. It’s an escalator straight to the basement. You’re not there to dream but to listen to death rattles . - . it’s handcuffs!! Line up on the line!! That’s advertising. "Cafe de la Morgue." There’s nothing any more of intelligence or intellect of interpretation. Radical today? Just another coterie as inbred as the fattest agencies . . . jittering junk-heads, fashionable, flippant and ephemeral as maggot agencies are constipated and conservative. Either you take the position as artist to shoe the stars from another universe or else you ventilate your brains on the options handed you by high geared head breakers. Radical??? Not for long. You’re only a handshake away from being flied down, ironed, melted, glazed, starched, and mashed by these fathers of happiness. It’s no longer noon at 2 o’clock. Tell yourself that the next time you impale yourself on a grain of hope."


- The Brothers Quay (taken from this article).


(I always find the Quay Brother's work such a useful reminder to keep taking risks and not get settled in my ways)

"Respectable people...what bastards!" - Emilé Zola

Lewis recently introduced me to the work of the writer Emilé Zola - at the moment, I have just begun reading The Belly of Paris. I admire his ability to go out and document the world around him in great detail - his books are precious resources, capturing the essence of a place and time before the existence of film. 

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.

These are a few examples of illustrations I made a few months ago for a commission. 

The brief was to design a set of characters - Mr and Mrs Farmer, their son Junior, Grandpa, Mrs Farmer's friend and Mr Farmer's colleague, who all discuss the work required of a pharmacist, and what this entails. 

The client stipulated that they didn't want the characters to have any racial resemblance "to avoid an awkward choice". They wanted four double page spreads to convey four conversations between the characters.

I sent the characters, along with a storyboard rough to the client, after which they gave me the green light to continue. That led to these illustrations:

After they saw these illustrations, they changed their minds. Now they wanted green silhouettes based on stock photography instead of illustrated characters. And they needed them by the next morning. Really, I should have told them to find another illustrator at this point - I felt quite depressed thinking I would have to put my name to something so far removed from my own ideas. But I really needed the money, so I was in a bind. I duly sent over these images:

Surprisingly, given that I was asked to use stock photography, they found the silhouettes too "catalogue pose". The woman was too slim for their liking and because she was a pharmacist she wasn't supposed to be wearing jeans. Now they were asking for an illustration of Grandpa and Junior, which they wanted to be "generic yet stylised". It would have been much more helpful if they had sent some sample images of what they thought "generic yet stylised" meant. I sent over this illustration:

After this shocking image, they cancelled the project.

I didn't feel that I was taking huge risks - I was trying to create images that people could relate to - women having tea together, a boy playing with a ball with his grandad.

The client was asking for Grandpa to have a walking stick and for Junior to be in a wheelchair and for the main character Mrs Farmer to be overweight, and for none of the characters to have a racial identity. They were so afraid of offending people, and I found this really sad. I'm sure that people with disabilities don't need characters to be disabled for them to relate to them. And it is terribly patronising to expect a white person to fail to identify with the thoughts and ideas of a black person.