At the start of 2010 i found myself in need of a challenge, and so i embarked on a project to document every bus trip that i took during the year in the form of a lino print.

I'm an illustrator by trade, but i was so busy illustrating that I wasn't really doing much observational drawing any more. Plus I really fancied getting to grips with a new [ish] skill. And lino printing is a fairly easy thing to set up, at least to begin with...

I decided that each print would be A5, in a limited edition of 13, to celebrate the fact that the route i travel most is the 13/13A. It's a good job I don't live in Headingley and travel on the number 97 all the time...

Now the year is up and all the prints from the project are posted here, in journey order.

Some of the prints are a bit all over the shop if I'm honest. Some aren't even that good. Some are pleasing in places, and one or two make me very, very happy. Several of them have left me feeling utterly exasperated and seriously thinking of jacking the whole thing in.

But I didn't, and here they are. Inspired by Billy Childish, I have resolved not to think of them in terms of success or failures - they just are what they are and I've been trying to learn to do them better and to make something worth looking at...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Bus Trip 67


this print is from my trip home after a wedding present gig at the academy [formerly the town and country club] in leeds...

if you're not familiar with them, the wedding present are a leeds band, fronted by dave gedge, making music that often document a particular male crapness in relationships and their aftermath. [my mate simon h suggested that we prepare for this gig by having pointless arguments with our wives...]

their songs are sometimes poignant, often darkly funny, with well observed and cleverly-written lyrics and back in 1989 they released 'bizarro', an album of indie guitar rock thrashed out at 100mph that soundtracked me through a painful romantic heartbreak, and which became my music of choice during the occasionally bitter fallout...


flash forward to 2010 and this was a sort of homecoming gig, with the band playing the whole lp.
and it was a brilliant night - sort of cathartic for me, with songs that i once wallowed in suddenly sounding all joyous and exhilarating. i was smiling for days afterwards.

in the print here, the grey bloke is 1990-me, surprised at 21st century me. the songs quoted are 'brassneck' and 'take me!' [possibly my favourite wedding present tune ever, a big, exuberant, 9 minute rock-out...]
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