I’ve been enjoying the daily drawing diary, even on the days where I forget and have to freeze the TV and scrawl something quickly at 11pm. As it turns out, even that’s a helpful approach, I think, because it forces you to work within the 4:3 ratio confines. Confines are good. Ah, if I was …
The thing the novel form is best at doing is showing point of view, do you agree? That capacity it has to put you inside another person’s head. If you read a first person narrative, you have bias, you have sympathy, you are involved, you care. And radio has that very particular intimacy – it …
My proposal for First Fortnight has been accepted. It’s always a mixture of relief, nervousness and happiness to hear you’ve got in, isn’t it? It’s as if you are travelling along, sending out an occasional ping into the void, and once in a while, you hear one come back out of the gloom, and suddenly everything is okay, …
I found the most unexpected gleaming jewel amongst the Christmas gift “ideas” at the back of Tallaght Sq, of all places, by this printmaker, Jan Goede. Boom! Five Christmas presents, on the spot. I thought, well, if suchandsuch doesn’t like this, quite frankly I disown him/her. So beautiful, heartfelt, closely observed, even more so “in the flesh”. If you …
Like the exact opposite of a swan paddling, all serenity above and power below, I am all frantic spin and no progress, or so it seems. Too many balls in the air, just to mix metaphors a bit more. But there’s a Quaker expression: Proceed when the way is open. Okay, so let’s do that, then. The Sunday …
(In the interests of full disclosure: I did have the pleasure of meeting Thi around this time last year on residency in the Atlantic Center for the Arts, in Florida. However, there is no flattery in the below review of her book, believe it or not. I have taken The Book Reviewer’s Ink Oath of Sincerity, so …
Read more “The Best We Could Do (Chapters 1 and 2) by Thi Bui”
During the week my friend, the famous artist, Ros Murray and I went to the IMMA to hear Rivane Neuenschwander talk about her current show, A Day Like Any Other. Neuenschwander is the instinctive master of the instantly apprehended image: the fragility of the soap bubble, the coloured ribbons you exchange for a wish, the objects created by strangers at …
I’ll be doing more public transport drawing now, since I am to be on the LUAS twice a week. Be warned, fellow passengers! This young man, hugging a box to his chest, was good to draw. Two elderly gentlemen beside me asked me afterwards if they were in the picture, which they weren’t. Pity, they …
..is everything. Coming from the 4:3 format medium of animation, where it’s one time-based image at a time, I have needed to reconfigure my thinking when it comes to timing in comics, where it is space that represents time. So I knocked together this comic, where (Uh. I did warn you) nothing happens, in the nature of …
One of the proposal drawings for First Fortnight – the house as symbol of the human mind. I listened to Johnny Cash as I made the supporting roughs, which was exactly fitting, him being all about pain. Not to mention gun crime, alcohol abuse, murder, tragic dysfunction and the black night of the soul, of …