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...

Friday, February 11, 2011

rules...

At art college [a long time ago now] someone had scrawled the motto 'THERE ARE NO RULES' across the wall in our studio space...

I started this project with a few rules to guide me - each print would be A5, and contain the date of the journey, the time i got on the bus and some indication of the length of the journey, images documenting the trip, and the number of the bus.

Pretty soon those rules got abandoned, as i forgot to look at my watch, or write things down, or wanted to do things a different size, or ran out of A5 lino.


i didn't mind though, those rules helped me to get started on the project and gave me some sort of framework for thinking about it, but it soon expanded beyond them.

in the end i sort of agree with the art school graffiti- writer. When it comes to art, any rules that do exist are only there for you to flex against, play with and wilfully disregard if you want to. that's part of the fun of it...
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)