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

spontaneity and design...

I’m constantly battling with - on the one hand - a love of spontaneity and - on the other - my slightly obsessive compulsion to over-design these prints.

One of the inspirations for the project was a talk by Billy Childish at the Greenbelt festival where he talked about abandoning notions of success and failure in his art and instead just treating it as play. Doing it for the process and not the product.
I love that idea, and I’ve struggled to keep it at the heart of this project… I guess I grew up valuing that punk rock ethic of content over style – it’s the spirit of the thing that’s important to me, not the competency of how it’s put together.

i'd take the expressionists over the impressionists every time...

:-)
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