At Salon Schmitz for the hanging of the annual exhibition. Many hands make light work, but there were so many at it, Walter Dahn and his teams of helpers, that I simply stood at the side and drew them all working.
Edward Lear
Visited Edward Lear’s world for an exhibition at the Poetry Society to mark his 200th birthday. Discovered what an extraordinary life and wide world he travelled and painted.
I had forgotten how closely my street drawings follow his tradition of topographic art, and also, how innocent his nonsense is …,The Bug with a Fiddle
When asked if I’d contribute to the show by my friend, Andrew Baker, who organised the exhibition with his wife, Linda, I began to sketch ideas, until I’d fished out a book of his, with what I quickly and shame-facedly realised was a false memory of his work.Elvislookalikia Contesta
Lear suffered from terrible depressions and, perhaps because of that, there is no hint of darkness in his nonsense. Stephanie bought an Edwardian edition of his Book of Botanical Nonsense to give me for my birthday and I took it with me to Cologne to work from.DJ Sparrow
Cow knitting jumpers with a penguin
Aldous Drawing in Rome
Aldous in Istanbul
Vimeo
In Berlin over the weekend to see my friends Mary and Markus Gertkin, Markus was wondering where he could find my motion-painting film of Istanbul – at the site above.
Made a portrait book while I was there (book number 54 in the Portrait Pages series) and some other watercolours and drawings while wandering around in a separate sketch-book.
Work for “fun” & painting for drama
Two bits of work have been occupying me these past few weeks – editing a film with Gilles and a bunch of paintings to do for a tv drama. Its working title is “White Heat”, and one of the main characters is an artist, the script calls for quite a few pictures over the course of six episodes, in different styles, and it was my job to make ’em,