Louis CK

Bright Eyes...

Last week, Dan, Beth, Helen and I went to see Conor Oberst play the Barbican. It was a wonderful gig, and totally reaffirmed what a uniquely talented musician, poet and performer he is.
Before the gig, Dan and I got talking about meeting our heroes and decided it is best never to meet them. But later on, we really regretted being too shy to say hello when we spied him in the pub under a hoard of hares's heads.

The girl with the binoculars

I woke up this morning with a vision of the top left hand corner of this drawing in my mind. Little huts and trees in a sketchy pinkish-blue. This is an imaginary record sleeve for music that doesn't exist.

It reminds me of that line in Belle and Sebastian's "If She Wants Me":

"I took a book and went into the forest
I climbed the hill
I wanted to look down on you
But all I saw was twenty miles of wilderness
so I went home"

I drew this listening to Boy Omega (whose album Night Visions is my new obsession) and also this video of the late Ray Bradbury giving advice to young writers:

Rebekah Brooks

"LOL!", as David Cameron would say.

The artist descends into madness

A few pages scanned from my sketchbook and coloured in Photoshop.

"without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public"

Audio of Bradley Manning's speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking government documents to Wikileaks:(via https://pressfreedomfoundation.org)



“In no case shall information be classified… in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency… or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.”

— Executive Order 13526, Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” - Nuremberg Principle IV

(taken from www.bradleymanning.org)

You wandered up a cul-de-sac, and now you've come back

I went to a record fair last weekend, and on the way back home I popped into Wolverhampton Art Gallery, where there was a wonderful exhibition of Harry Eccleston's drawings, gouache paintings and etchings (he was the first full-time artist and designer of bank notes for the Bank of England.) I was sort of hoping that the gallery might have some of his prints or postcards in its shop, but alas, the usual lineup of Pre-Raphaelite ladies on the carousel. 

I was really in awe of his work (including a fully labelled drawing of a fire engine he did aged 12 that made me want to just give up right away) - lovely rich velvety blacks and greys, gleaming slices, sprays and spreads of pure white. I wish I'd had the chance to try etching at some point in my art education, I'm always drawn to the look of it. 

Anyway, it fired me up a bit, after weeks of feeling deeply mediocre and uninspired, I sat down and drew all day long, listening to Leonard Cohen, Françoise Hardy and The Wedding Present.

Two Turtledoves...

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

Glockenspiel, Ukulele, Fireworks...

Antoine Dreams of Inverted Rockets from Emma Ridgway on Vimeo.

Merz Beach Collage

I've started to play about with creating films and music lately - (in the most amateur sense possible) - but I'm hoping to find a way of combining this with illustration. 

I'm also (with the help of my very talented friend Line Lorna as well as Wendy Froud's amazing tutorial dvds) learning how to make dolls and puppets from polymer clay.

"Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper." - David Lynch

I've been experimenting with collage, watercolour and creating textures with a printing brayer.

Hebe (my cat) has been very ill lately, and became very thin and bony, so we've been nursing him back to (rather rotund) good health with sardines and mackerel.