comics - Art Portfolio

Grids are a mix of news and stream of consciousness, ideas, and short stories. They are sort of visual news – mixed up and selected news – and daily art journals, observing and recording the day and world around me. I like the quality of this work – it’s fast, rough and I can do this well. Hand made, pen, ink, pencil and wash. A lot faster than digital!

These are micro stories, mini comics, quick and expressive, sort of news comics.

Opinionated, comment, political, personal, topical, experiments with narrative.
There is an immediacy in the work – this is very important to me – freshness, quickness, from idea to conception in one day, making and showing at same time.

I’ve been making these since August 23, so there are quite a lot now, but not as many as I’d like. I think would be great if I could do one a week, at least, and it can be a sort of weekly summary of the news, the world, and my thoughts. There are a lot more here

January 2024 – my Grids were shown at the Solastalgia exhibition, Turf Projects, Croydon …

In 2008, there was an ‘Occupy’ site at St Pauls in central London. There were lots of drawings and paintings sellotaped to the walls; the area became a sort of temporary public Art gallery. Works full of slogans and messages, full of passion.

It occurred to me that many people wanted to express their views in this way, and contribute their own art work to express their support and solidarity; but they couldn’t physically be there – at St Pauls.

I built an online cartoon tool to make it easy to collaboratively author your own political/satirical cartoons. Once a week I printed them, went to St Pauls and stuck them on the walls. Some well known artists contributed their work, building up a big stock of ‘ready-made’ fantastic drawings and cartoons – for everyone to remix into their own political cartoons.

The project was a collectively authored and networked satire, giving people a chance to participate/ support/ speak out/ in a creative way.

I am in the process of updating the project code to the latest version of PHP, as it doesnt work anymore. Once this is done I will post a link.