I went to the Royal Academy sometime in the summer of 2019 to see an exhibition of Felix Vallotton’s paintings – ‘Felix Vallotton – Painter of Disquiet’. I was most intrigued by his humorous woodcuts and decided to make an ink drawing copy of one that I enjoyed. A shameless rip-off! Just for fun to stave off the usual afternoon boredom.
It is infuriatingly warm and it is also my birthday. In my bedroom in my parents’ home in Kuala Lumpur, sweating buckets and trying in vain to focus. I brought a new Daler Rowney sketchbook out here with me to while the afternoons away, getting back into sketching and drawing, and it was difficult to get started as I hadn’t picked up a brush pen in so long. My new Winsor and Newton sable brush was immediately disappointing; having just dipped it in water, then Sumi ink, the brush hairs then split like a fish tail. No idea if I just bought a dud from Cass Arts or if this is the result of poor quality control from Winsor and Newton. Really gutted especially since it is such an expensive brush. Anyway on the afternoon of my 51st year, I made a lonely drawing of a path snaking through a wintry wood, while sweltering in the tropics. Trying to make the most of an uncooperative brush! Happy birthday to me.
Just the other week I managed to catch the Modigliani exhibition at the Tate Modern before it closed on Easter Sunday. It was inspirational, far better than the Picasso exhibition that featured the work he did in 1932. The Picasso exhibition made me come away feeling vaguely unsettled particularly by his depictions of his mistress. Genius he might have been but it was difficult for me to feel sympatico with Picasso. So I came home and many days later, sat down and made an ink drawing, a rendition of one of my favourite Modigliani paintings, a portrait of an unknown girl in deep reds and browns.
My India ink has dried up, it has become a gloopy thick jelly stuck inside the bottle but I managed to pick up enough ink with my wet brush to use it for this drawing. Thankfully the Liquitex ink still worked so I used that for the fine hatching work with my Deleter pen. The brush had lost many of its bristles so it was hard to make a decent line. Still, it was all done within half an hour and it felt satisfying to be drawing something again, as if I was working out an elegant solution to some mathematical problem. I don’t yet know if I have the stamina to start planning another story. Perhaps I will have to wait for inspiration to strike a second time.
It has been a good while since I last posted on here, various distractions and other occupations meant that I didn’t have time (or the energy) to devote to keeping this blog updated. I have also been working on some digital art – for some GPS-based games I have been writing and coding, nothing much more serious than that. It isn’t much fun for me to try drawing anything with a stylus on a computer, but I can see how it has its attractions for those people who are more practised and skilful at digital art. Nothing like smearing ink over a page or knocking over a bottle of India ink over your last finished panel…! But I did manage to produce some acceptable graphics that won’t be too closely scrutinised by the players. Anyhow, not wishing to digress any further, I came across this blog on Broken Frontier which resonated with me particularly over the last few months, since the last Comiket fest at the British Library.
I self-publish all my own books on a rather small scale and also don’t do much about marketing them – I sell them at Foyles (but they rarely grab attention since they are stored sideways in cramped shelves, and my books do not have any lettering on their spines). A lot of the observations in Andy Oliver’s articles above coincide exactly with my own, and it is a concern that we are not reaching the wider public, and for sure, the lack of curation doesn’t help (although I cannot propose any fairer alternative). Like articles and other stuff on the web, there’s a lot of white noise out there and filtering out the wheat from the chaff is getting increasingly difficult with time. Moreover, some of the chaff out there know how to market themselves extremely well. Perhaps I’d never properly understood or appreciated how crucial marketing really is to selling a product. It is something that I am also astoundingly bad at, and it is no good pretending it doesn’t truly matter.
It doesn’t help that I suspect that I don’t write or draw comics for people who usually read and enjoy graphic novels. I don’t have a target audience in mind or if I do, they’re most likely the sort of people who spend their time browsing in the Fiction or Poetry sections of a bookstore, steering clear of anything to do with comics, god forbid!
I haven’t spent much time pondering over my next issue of Cabaret Voltaire, because I have so many issues of The Street Dancer’s Romance to sell and with only one comics festival under my belt this year, it looks like I have to be a bit more organised about attending these festivals and fairs in 2015 to sell more of my stock. Thought Bubble in Leeds 2015? Have wheels, will travel!
Well, the weekend is coming and I have finally made my poster for my tablet at Comiket!
Yes, I got inspiration from one of Frans Masereel’s woodcuts in “The City” while I was trawling around wondering what on earth I could draw. I really wasn’t feeling in the mood but anyway, managed to pencil and ink this in about an hour or so. Went to the printer’s to get it printed (in colour) and laminated, and voila! Quite pleased with the results, it is probably more eye-catching than the last one I did for Painting Stories.
See you at Comiket!