Travelogue: Paris to Madrid

What follows is a record of my journey from Paris to Madrid: The bicycle made the air crossing without a hitch at either end of the journey and after a slight delay S & P met me at terminal 9, and so began a gentle start to my trip, a week of lolling around Paris, marred only by my overindulgence at the party thrown by S on my penultimate night. As a result the train journey to Bordeaux was a bit of a struggle in my delicate state, but uneventful. Read full article >>

Public art: Thoughts on graffiti

An ungoing aspect of running Blackbird Prints is trying to find methods of allowing people to see the high quality of the prints by viewing them in person rather than as an inferior version on a computer monitor. It has made me wonder about the legitimacy of traditional galleries defining what is and isn’t “Art”. Now with the likes of Banksy further blurring the line between graffiti (street art) and gallery art I want to write one or two thoughts on this matter. Read full article >>

Mural proposal: Freedom of expression

Anthony Smith: Introducing our latest Artist

We are very pleased to welcome Anthony Smith as the latest Artist to make prints of his watercolour and oil paintings available for your pleasure through Blackbird Prints. Andrew has been freelancing as a Wildlife painter since the mid 1980’s, with his paintings forming parts of collections in America, Europe and Japan.

The North of England Zoological Society being one of his regular clients, having produced the artwork for Chester Zoo since 1999, Andrew has also been commissioned by English Nature, The National Trust, and the R.S.P.B. amongst others.

Amongst his accolades Andrew has won the top award at the “Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Fine Art Award”, and been runner-up for the “National World Art Award” at the “Society of Wildlife Artists Exhibition”.

 

Illustration: A guide for the curious

Having worked as an illustrator on and off since the mid-nineties I have often been asked how I come up with the images in my portfolio, so I thought it would be a good idea to try to explain the process here by going through a few past commissions.

Most of my work has been commissioned to appear alongside articles in magazines. In my experience many commissioning editors/art directors are happy enough with an illustration so long as it fills the designated space on the page in an aesthetically pleasing manner, and catches the attention of the reader long enough to draw their gaze to the article. It is true that both these attributes should be found in any illustration but in my view a good editorial illustrator should aim to achieve more than this.

One approach for an editorial illustrator is to attempt to identify the crux of the article and come up with a pictorial representation of it which helps focus the readers’ attention on these points, highlights the points. I often look upon a job as solving a puzzle: trying to tie in the relevant elements of the article to form an elegant and coherent image which, granted, is not the easiest of tasks when working on an article about the six month financial forecast of sub-prime mortgage lending. In this regard I was fortunate on many jobs by having a writer to work with who used plenty of pictorial elements in his writing.

While living in Dublin I had a stint illustrating the same article in a bi-monthly magazine for just shy of two years. The pieces were written as a reflection of events occurring, first or second-hand, during the previous fortnight of the writer’s life. He is a gay Irish man living in London, so naturally issues concerning being homosexual accounted for part of the subject matter. To a greater extent the features centred on his experiences working as a counsellor, giving guidance on personal, social and psychological problems to members of the public. His pieces never failed to interest, and I looked forward to receiving his copy every fortnight. Much of the illustration artwork I have for sale on this site as giclee prints were illustrations for these articles.

#1. Feather  (aka "True confessions")

The giclee print for sale on the site called “Feather” was published in an article titled “True confessions- a tale of Human Magpies and singing Blackbirds”. Read full article >>

#2. Shoal  (aka "Fishy business")        

The version of “Shoal” on sale on the site differs from the painting that was used to illustrate the article it was commissioned for.Read full article >>

#3. I love my Postman (as published)

After drawing an approximate representation of each element I cut them out into their individual shapes and than rearrange them on the page, like a collage. Read full article >>

#4. Captured heart  (aka "Brothers must do it for themselves")

While going through a phase of collecting little objects that caught my eye for one reason or another, putting them in bottles with fluid, and drawing their refracted view Read full article >>

#5. Wedding photo  (aka "The Queen is dead")

The sketched out ideas for “Wedding photo” are long lost, only the final drawing remains, but I was able to track down resources for some of the images in the painting. Read full article >>

 

#6. Bull Terrier  (aka "Better the devil you know")

The giclee print for sale on the site called “Bull Terrier” was published in an article titled “Better the devil you know; all the best tunes and some good ideas”.

As with "Shoal", the giclee print "Bull Terrier" differs from the painting from which it derived which was originally commissioned for, and published along-side, the article "Better the devil you know". I cropped the image somewhat and made the dog larger, but more noticeably I removed the pink objects hanging from the tree. Their significants will become apparent in the next paragraph, but I felt the image could be just as playful without them, and with their removal the focus rests more on the dog.

“Better the devil you know” opens with an announcement that the Archbishop of Genoa has released a ten step programme on how to resist the devil and his work, and follows it with a consideration of the personification of evil through the ages from a theological perspective. The writer tells us that during the previous week it took a trip to what must be the epitome of evil in the Archbishop’s eyes, London’s Hampstead Heath where, during the cover of darkness, gay men go to meet strangers to have sex in the bushes with.The Heath has semi-officially become known as a safe place for gay men to meet at night in the sense that the police only intervene when there has been violence or theft and have been non-judgemental and supportive when they have been called. Working for a charity the writer had the job of chaining two large fibreglass dispensers to a tree in the woods, one filled with condoms, the other with tubes of lubrication gel, and illuminated by one of those chemical glow sticks. As well as providing the physical means of protection from the likes of A.I.D.S. by distributing condoms the charity also conducts what they call “motivational interviews” where they try to make sure the men taking part in such potentially dangerous sexual activity are aware of the possible consequences of the choice they are making. Success has been measured by the observation that over the years repeatedly more condoms are taken than lubrication packs.

 

The image above is a detail from some of the sketched initial ideas for the “Bull Terrier” painting / giclee print. At this early stage of the thought process the drawings are kept very lose (scribbled visual notes) since I am more concerned with coming up with ideas, working the stronger ideas into more polished drawings later (as can be seen in the image to the left). When you click to enlarge the image you will notice that it is one of many on an A4 sheet with type written at its head. Occasionally the writer was late with completing the article. At such times he usually sent me the bare skeleton of what he thought the article would eventually be based upon. If you read what he has written you will see that in this instance he just gave me one idea to work on, and as he happened he decided not to mention the tree in the final version of the article, so I am not sure whether somebody reading the printed article would have had a clue what I was addressing in the illustration?

I’m still not convinced that the condoms read as condoms. When I look at them now I think they look more like sausages! I would do them differently if I had a second chance. I had wanted to paint a bull terrier in an illustration for ages, so this brief gave me the perfect opportunity. I love the shape of their head and the areas where the short coat of white hair thins around the snout and ears to show the pink of their skin.

At the time I was supplementing the income from illustration by working from 5pm to 2am in a call centre for a large american credit card bank. One of their cards, the card I was chiefly employed to sell, was aimed at people in the u.s.a. who classed themselves as Irish-americans. We would be calling them just as they were winding down after work, the idea being that they, being Irish-americans, would be so excited at receiving a phone call from an actual Irishman or woman all the way from the "Motherland" that they would be begging to have the card we were flogging by the end of the call! Anyway, as you can imagine it was soul destroying but I used to escape to a certain extent by bring the illustration articles into work and doodling ideas on the job.

 

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Eoghan Carbery: Exhibition

One of our popular artists, Eoghan Carbery, in an exciting colaboration with Cumbrian Potter Rebecca Callis, is exhibiting work at Fairfield Mill in the rolling Cumbrian hills of Sedbergh. The sensuous symbiosis of Eoghan's line drawings with the pure, elegant forms of Rebecca's porcelain vessels proved an obvious hit in a near sell out show.

The good news is that they are currently working on the next run which, a little bird reliably tells me, will include many pieces with images which Blackbird Prints regulars equate Eoghan with. Watch this space.

      

 

Ubh:  Man of many talents

You may be interested to known that aswell as painting Ubh also voices his creativity through music using an old Atari to sequence sounds from a Roland W30 and a Boss DR660 drum machine. Some of his tracks have been uploaded to his pofiles on myspace as Ubhmusic and Saint Johns.