Its quite odd really cause there was a point in my arts career where I didn’t think that I was going to get anywhere, let alone this far and in fact I did a typing course in Stockport a while back and I thought I needed another string to my bow and find a way of earning money and in fact that typing course got me a job at the Whitworth Gallery and things started improving from there. I’ll start of my saying this is a composite image of some of the illustrations I did for the letters page of the Guardian newspaper and pretty much represents where I am now. It’s been quite a long [journey] to get here over about 10, 15 years. The first half of which was spent working as an artist and the second half of which working as an illustrator. So the structure of the talk basically will just cover my early years, I’ll try no to waffle on about that too much, and my fine art beginnings and my influences and how I got into illustration and then I’ll sort of look at the nitty-gritty of illustrating and the jobs, all the down-to-earth stuff.So, I’ll move on to now, and kind of give you a potted history, of where I began. After school, I went to Manchester Poly, and did a Foundation course, it’s MMU now. Following that brilliant year it meant then that I could get into Newcastle University where I decided to do Fine Art. It’s funny cause I don’t really feel that I’ve made particular choices over the years, I suppose I hadn’t really thought about what I was doing, I’d enjoyed art at school, I had a teacher who’d encouraged me, it was all quite academic and so I thought, I’ll be an artist. I went to the Foundation course with that in mind, I went to Newcastle with that in mind, spent four years at Newcastle probably slowly getting further and further away from what it is I actually like doing which is drawing and designing, just making interesting pictures. I started to get into a conceptual frame of mind and started doing installations and all sorts, and went way of track really.
It was interesting putting this talk together cause it made me realise the influences I had then were not at all far from the influences I have now. On the top left is an image by Terry Frost, and again it’s the same sort of principles of colour and design and space and simplicity, I’ve always been quite interested in minimalism in art and the general philosophy that less of quite often more. The little Bento box at the bottom is represents my transitional time after Newcastle I went immediately down to London thinking I’m going to be an artist in London, it’s exciting and of course, the reality is very, very different and I just spent a year floundering about not really knowing what I was doing. So basically I came home, defeated, came back up to Manchester and that’s when I did my typing course but during that year I went to Japan for about six weeks and taught English and travelled round and I think a lot of influences from Japan and Japanese culture crept in a kind of subconscious way. It’s all about colour, everything is about design, everything is about symbolism, even a piece of plastic grass is symbolic for them, freshness and rural scenes, it’s all melded together somehow and I find it very interesting. The image on the right is an etching by Goya, when I came back to Manchester, I sorted myself out, did the typing course, got myself a proper job, I worked at the Whitworth Art Gallery and I had a studio in Manchester, Bankley House Studios in Levenshulme and they’re still running and doing really well. And while I was at the Whitworth, the staff were asked to choose a piece from the collection that had been exhibited and write a little bit about why you liked it and again, when I was putting all this together and trying to choose images that I felt reflected my current practice, I don’t know if you can but to me I feel that there are similarities between all three of those images, not least in the fact that there’s quite a lot of empty space, certainly in the Frost and the Goya and the space is about created drama and creating tension I think between detailed aspects of the image and the empty parts of the image. So those are sort of a bit of background.
From there, lots of punishment, I decided I wasn’t going to let London defeat me so I went back. I was lucky enough to get a residency with a company called Acne who support artists, and at the time I kind of emphasised how bad the conditions were at the Bankley Studios where I used to have to work in woollen gloves and hats, paint used to freeze over and it was a nightmare, so on the strength of that and possibly my work, I got this residency in London and I was there for three years. It kind of felt like the dizzying heights of the art world and to be honest, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable in it. But my neighbour at the time was Martin Creed who went on to win the Turner Prize in 2001, which was just after I’d finished the residency and I included this photo of one of his works because it represents how I felt about being a fine artist. He once said that when he thinks about making a piece of work, he gets very anxious about it and he spends most of the time worrying about if it’s a good piece of work or a bad piece of work and in fact the finished work is more about that, about his feelings about creating work than it is about any point at which he might have started. And I take my hat of to him because he managed to make a career out of that whereas for me, that pretty much decided me that I couldn’t do it because I found it such a difficult process, the constant need to be original and out-there and its all very pressured. But the piece at the bottom is probably my most successful piece from that time in that I won a small competition with it, I took a series of photographs of lists, shopping lists and things. There was a competition called Political Homeopathy which is about making your voice heard in very small ways and the irony is that the winning pieces were published in magazines, political magazines like New Statesmen and the Spectator. It was a nice turning point and the money that I got from that bought me my first computer. I had a friend at that time who was supporting his own art practice by designing cards, he taught me how to use Illustrator and then all these little cogs just kind of clicked into place and I suddenly thought I don’t have to do this anymore, I can go back to doing what it is I enjoy which is on a much smaller scale, in a functional sense, where there’s a context and I need an arena for it in a way. Making art just felt like you were surrounded by this space and there’s nothing to anchor you but illustration felt like it was much more [manageable].
So, at that point, I was working part-time all the way through just in various offices, fairly rubbishy jobs but they paid the bills. It was quite an exciting time because things started to fall into place and I’d found an area where I’d started to feel comfortable. So I just started looking at everything, images from all sorts of areas and collecting them and building up files and I had no rules about what it was I was collecting, anything that I was just drawn to I cut it out or picked it up and I’ve got files and files of stuff like this. So you can see, I was interested in all sorts of stuff, Patrick Caulfield, lots of decorative stuff, hand-drawn stuff, food, which I’ve done loads of food-related illustration, everyday things so it was just really exciting to be aware of all sorts of different things I just felt comfortable with. And at that point I was doing a kind of self-imposed, mini crash-course in illustration, I didn’t have any training, I didn’t know how to actually earn money from this. So, I did it by the book, I contacted the Association of Illustrators, I got their “How to Survive as an Illustrator” guide, read it from cover to cover. I did everything that you’re supposed to do. I made very unsophisticated little mail-outs that I printed of my own computer. I cut out articles from newspapers and did my very own illustrations; I just knew I needed to build up a portfolio, to have something to show people. And then it was pretty much getting out there and learning from the job. So, I did my mail-outs, I rang people up, I took in my portfolio, I followed up phone calls and in the end, new jobs started to come in, it was quite surprising. And going back to the little Japanese Bento box, my first illustration was for Elle magazine and I did their horoscope, which was Pisces. I’ve put these in cause I felt, on the left-hand side, the group of images was the kind of thing I was interested in when I was doing Fine Art. Julian Opie, Claus Oldenburg, who I just used to love, he’s pretty much a pop artist, and Andy Warhol, and the eggs. In a way, the imagery in these works isn’t that far away from the kind of thing that I do which is rooted in the everyday and it’s about taking things out of context and I think it’s a very fine line between aspects of fine art and aspects of illustration.
... At this stage there was still another 50 minutes to transcript so I decided to leave it as this.
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