Marcel Proust

Proust is one of those figures who kind of towers below a lot of writers. It's the damn length of A la recherche du temps perdu that's the problem. Like Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest et al it's one of those works that everyone should have read but just hasn't got round to reading (or has reached page 63 and given up at the sheer cliff face of words ahead). Personally I was always fascinated by Proust the man semi-retiring from the world (partly through intention, partly through a frail constitution) to write for years in his cork-lined room. I like small-scale heroics like that.

I was pretty pleased with the drawing that this print is taken from. Faster than other recent pieces, and possibly better.

Anyway, the print is available now in the shop.

Giil Sans in My Shopping

Haven't had a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer for ages, saw them in the supermarket the other day, loved the (only slightly - grudgingly? - updated) package design, bought them. Almost chipped a tooth on them. The secret is to let them come to room temperature, and for that room to be somewhere outside the Arctic Circle (they're made in Uddingston, near Glasgow, so draw your own conclusions).

But yes, check out the Gill Sans. Who these days would have the balls to stick so such a classic weight and draughty track? They're simply not cool, just functional, delicious, gone in about 45 seconds. That's design right there.

Write-Ups

I've been working on other projects for about a month, but now I'm back and I find the shop has had a couple of very nice write-ups online. The first is on Thrillist:

http://www.thrillist.com/home-gadgets/standard-designs_art_books_online-shops

And the second is on sofa.com:

http://www.sofa.com/uncategorized/its-a-witty-sign-of-the-times

Ah yes, all public appreciation gladly accepted...

Ballardian Plastics

Creepy - but don't have nightmares. This is from a fascinating article about JG Ballard's typographical experiments, which can be found here.

The Joy of Low-Tech

Call it a minor investment. This is my recently-acquired Salter portable postal weighing scale. Why anyone would want a portable postal weighing scale, I don't know - maybe there are places where accurately weighing your items to within 10g in order to select the correct postage is illegal (probably in a country where MC Escher is prime minister). But it was relatively cheap - I think about £6 - and it looks dinkily functional, like a distant relative of something Dieter Rams might have created on his lunch break.

New Greetings Cards

I've also, after much deliberation, begun selling sets of cards taken directly from my portrait prints series. In each set you'll get five cards & envelopes, the cards featuring either Jacques Tati (pictured), George Orwell, Dylan Thomas or Oscar Wilde, depending on which one you buy. I may do others, we'll see how these ones go first.

Have a look at them in the shop.

Recession Books

Inspired by my love of the great Penguin Books cover designs of the 1940s, I've created a series of prints showing how classic literature might look if it were subject to the same cutbacks that everything else seems to be undergoing in the present financial calamity. Finding a way to laugh at problems is a good starting point for dealing with them, I find. That's my approach here.

Anyway, check them out in the shop.

Three Portraits

Time to round up the new portrait prints I've recently finished (and which are now available here).

First up is James Joyce. Yes, I remember well the outsized Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses that used to sit awkwardly among the other paperbacks on my bookshelves. Carrying it in a bag felt like I was carrying not a book but an object, some kind of talisman... something like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in fact - a massive encyclopaedic encapsulation of life and customs written from a very partial (and very funny) point of view. Though it's set in (and all about) Dublin, Joyce wrote the bulk of it (all of it?) in exile in various cities in continental Europe (Trieste being one such city). Putting your subject matter at arm's length can certainly help the creative process (especially the story-making, exaggerating process), but it's interesting to note that Joyce frequently wrote to friends 'back home' to ask them for details about this place or that place to ensure his very particular form of accuracy. Crowdsourcing, as it were. There's nothing new in rock 'n' roll, as they say.

Next is Harold Pinter. Here's my claim to fame, if you can call it that: I once stood on Harold Pinter's big toe. Waiting in a theatre foyer Somewhere In Europe before a performance of the fantastic No Man's Land ("I'll drink to that", etc.) I went up to the tea table (yes, I know, nice isn't it?) to buy some tea. Transaction over, I took a step back and away only to find my heel had found someone else's foot to perch on. Turning round ready with fulsome apologies I saw that my unwitting victim was in fact the great man himself.

'Sorry!', I said. He glowered at me. There was... an awkward silence.

I trotted off sharpish down the stairs only to be followed by Pinter and his companion (the theatre manager?). After a good 10 seconds Pinter's anger had subsided enough that he was able to speak again and I heard his unmistakable baritone ask the man, "So... how's tricks?"

You see - it's one thing to meet your heroes, it's quite another to injure them. Reminds me of that quote from Vivian Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End: "I never met a man I didn't maim."

Finally (it has been a productive week-and-a-half) it's Dylan Thomas, stories about whom are legion. I like the one where he met one of his idols, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin found his drunken four-letter-littered behaviour appalling, and told him so. Thomas walked out into Chaplin's conservatory and simply pissed up a pot plant. Now that's poetic compression!

Words Into Images

How about this for a chunk of text? If you get enough words together, they become a picture (or even a sculpture).

Depending on how my experiments go, the relevance of this image may become apparent later...

Kafka

The thing that struck me most about Kafka's writing the first time I encountered it was the physicality of it. We're used to valuing brevity and succinctness over wordiness and bulk, but here was a form of writing where a paragraph could run over two, three, four pages. A single paragraph! Great blocks of writing, dense as a meteor, and containing an equivalent amount of universal wisdom. The vast rockface of protocol he was writing about solidified in the vast rockface of words he created. It's that great modernist thing of form following function, and like a lot of modernist work it's great on the large scale but also in miniature - if you've not read them, treat yourself to his collected short stories. Anyway, my Kafka print is available in the shop here.

Young Intellectuals

Here's my new print for this week - some Young Intellectuals.

It's the first print I've done in my looser, note-taking style (although the Vintage Radio Calendar is close). I've always enjoyed drawing like this because, even though it looks simple, it forces you to make every line count. So you have to bring everything you know about how faces fit together - all the 'rules' - and gently bend them.

This is also the first print I've put up in the shop that isn't hand-lettered. I wanted to make something that was kind of promotional material for young intellectuals (can I still count myself among them, I wonder?), so the layout's very faintly suggestive of a poster. Ranged left type - can't beat it. And Helvetica Bold - as you know from my Gill Sans post earlier, I love a nice sans serif. I was out of love with Helvetica for a long time. But visiting New York and seeing it employed so beautifully - white on black - as signage on the subway system (among many other places) made me realise that it can be a force for good rather than for blandness.

And while we're on the subject, here's the trailer for Gary Hustwit's film about the font, appropriately entitled Helvetica. It's well worth checking out.

Important Information for Buyers in the USA

Here's some info for those of you in the States who have bought from my Etsy shop recently:

In November the Department of Homeland Security instituted extra security measures on mail inbound to the US. This has meant that shipping times have been extended way beyond what we'd normally expect - up to 7 or 8 weeks instead of the normal 2 for Airmail. This is due to the DHS's need to restrict postal transit methods and to screen each item individually. More information can be found here:

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1289237893803.shtm

...and here:

http://www.etsy.com/storque/seller-handbook/an-important-note-on-international-postal-delays-11571/

Lots of sellers in the US - and thus lots of buyers in the US - are having to deal with this:

www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6739394

The key thing to remember is that the mail is getting through, eventually. It's unfortunate and annoying that this is happening but there's nothing we can do about it - plus it's meant to be for our security, after all - so I'd ask for your patience and understanding if you're still waiting on one of my pieces to arrive. Thanks.

The Remains of Hastings Pier

Greetings Cards

I've created fifteen greetings cards based on my series of portrait prints. Just as with the prints themselves, I made them because they were things I wanted to have (and I hope other people will want to have too) - nice, unique, solid cards for any occasion, a note to a friend, a birthday, anything. I mean, before this I couldn't find a card with George Orwell, or Igor Stravinsky, or Dorothy Parker on the front. Exactly the sort of thing I'd love to send people. But now... ta-da!

I've arranged them in three groups of five, or there's also the option to pick any five you like. You'll find them in the shop here. Enjoy!

Mutual Appreciation

So here's my other new print from this week: Oscar Wilde. But it's also a Morrissey piece too, and the connection is via The Smiths' song 'Cemetry Gates' from their album 'The Queen Is Dead' (2011 is somewhat gallingly the 25th anniversary of the album's release, fact fans!). "Keats and Yeats are on your side", Morrissey croons, "While Wilde is on mine". I thought it was a nice idea to imagine a co-endorsement from beyond the grave...

Come to think of it, it kind of reminds me of the Marshall McLuhan bit from 'Annie Hall':

The print is now available in the shop here.

William Carlos Williams

I've loved William Carlos Williams' poetry ever since we were introduced to his famous poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow' at school. It blew our minds. And then later, at college, discovering in a corner of the art school library a dusty, unread copy of his long work 'Paterson'... it was like finding a Picasso in an attic full of empty boxes (although the reality of the situation was that I found a Williams in a basement full of books on Picasso).

The print is available here.

Top Prof

TS Eliot. Imagine having this as your 9.30 Monday morning lecture. (Or your 2.15 Monday morning Open University broadcast).

Via the University of London's School of Advanced Study.

New Improved Alphabet

There's a new print in the shop as of today: The New Improved Alphabet. I finally got it finished after a few weeks tinkering with it.

I've always been fascinated by the physical forms our language can take, and how it's evolved over the centuries. This print thinks ahead and wonders where our alphabet might be in a few years time. Is the fabric of our contemporary lives dictated and circumscribed by the limitations of our language, or is language, text, delicately vulnerable to our passing whims and fancies? 

Yeah so: all that, in print form, made out of jokes. Linguistics can be fun too, you know!

Then & Now

I spent yesterday afternoon wandering around Tate Britain. Gloomy, rainy winter afternoons are the perfect time to go - the place was nearly empty, and what with the first-week-back-after-Christmas vibe and the fact that the place was undergoing a serious rehang the sense of everything being just a little bit strange, a little bit heightened, was palpable.

Because of the rehang, I'm guessing, a lot of the rooms currently have a cobbled-together feel. They just about cling to the Tate's usual chronological or thematic ordering, but the edges are rough, the conceptual superstructure has gaps in it. This, it turns out, is a Very Good Thing. The mind is free to bump enjoyably like a ball in a pinball machine from one work to the next... rather than glide through on the comfortable conveyor belt that so many major institutions style their 'visitor experiences' into these days. And as a result - even with the same works that, as a long-time Tate visitor, I've seen for the best part of three decades now - I took in much more in two hours yesterday afternoon than I think I've taken in in the past ten years. (Obviously the curators should be credited with this achievement and, in the words of David Frost on That Was The Week That Was, 'I'm sure they're doing a grand job...')

One of the things that both bumped my mind and snagged it (oh go on, let me extend & inflate the metaphor) was the above painting, Horned Forms by Graham Sutherland from 1944. For a long time I didn't get Graham Sutherland's work. We were always told that he was one of postwar British art's biggies, and with Bacon and Moore formed a kind of tetchy triumvirate of all that was dour, earnest and important. But I didn't see why, and so for the longest time dismissed him as a painter of abstracted plantlife and the occasional spiky crucifixion (which was all you seemed to need to do to get on in art in Britain in the years 1945-1955).

But now, I get it, and I really got it looking at this painting yesterday afternoon. I think it helps to have had a few holidays recently in the countryside in southern England & Wales. It's quiet, but it's not peaceful. It's only very gently undulating, but it's not flat. It's green, but it's brown and it's grey, and the green when you really look at it isn't really even green. And then when you arrive at some glacier-carved monumental mountain range you suddenly realise the relationship between up there and down there (physically speaking), and that's a lot of what I think Sutherland is on about in his work. It's that, and bringing it indoors - into the studio, into the head - and letting what's outside, what's all around, live in there for a bit. It's genius stuff, and I'm just glad I finally appreciate it.

The Magic of Gill Sans

A drawing from 1932 for the G, O, Q, C and D of Gill Sans. Via Flickr.

You'll notice from my banner that I'm a big Gill Sans fan. This is the font that kick-started my education in and fascination with typography - it was the first font that, as a student, I took time to read up on, allowing me to put a name (and a history) to the lettering I'd seen around all my life but which now appeared to be dying out. From government posters to the sides of steam locomotives, here was a font that radiated authority and a certain type of English grandeur in caps, but which could also be surprisingly intimate and almost fun when blocks of text were set in smaller point sizes (when first using Apple Macs I had a thing for making tiny note cards and super-miniature posters using it).

The classic Jan Tschichold-redesigned Penguin Books covers are where Gill Sans really comes into its own. Small, portable, made of cheap mass-produced materials, and - crucially - succinctly direct. The above is one of my most prized possessions, a Penguin first edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The whole package - type, materials, novel - is postwar Britain in a nutshell.

Palast Der Republik, Berlin

Great series of photographs by Thorste Klapsch of this now-demolished conference centre in what used to be East Berlin. Via Spiegel Online.

Book Covers

Cover painting by Louis Di Valentin for a 1964 edition of Bend Sinister. Via A Journey Round My Skull. Part Willem de Kooning, part Philip Guston, with shades of that wonderful dreadful angular palette knife-overusing style that used to be around in the 1960s and 1970s. Not that there's any evidence of a palette knife being used here, but you know what I mean.

Jacques Tati

 

Okay, I'm going to begin this blog with a little piece about Jacques Tati, the French comic and film director. Tati fascinates me because he's someone who brings disciplines together in order to create these wonderful hybrids which continue to bloom in the imagination long after the movie has ended: he was a mime artist who used sound (and language); his movies are full of long takes in which nothing appears to be happening but where, when you look closer, so much is happening; an awkward man physically whose sense of choreography - for himself as well as for others - was supremely balletic... the list could go on for quite a while. Indeed, I could fill page after page with praise for Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Mon Oncle and Playtime (my three favourites), but what I love about his work most of all is the creation of expansive tableaux where every square inch of the screen contains something that is actively contributing to the story, or the effect, or the emotion, or the gag (or all at the same time). It's this simultaneity of scope that I really admire in an artist, and Tati has it in spades.

Here's a very brief clip from Playtime to illustrate. So much choreography for what is essentially a gag we've all seen hundreds of times. But as well as seeing the gag itself your eye can't help but be drawn to all the things surrounding the gag, the impersonal protocols and artifice of the city - which is where Tati's deeper intentions lie. And don't forget, as I mention in my Tati print, this isn't filmed in a real city but in the mini-city Tati built for the purpose of making the film. Amazing!