ABOUT THE ZINE

I’ve taken a lifetime in the company of Jorge Luis Borges, JG Ballard, Nan Shepherd, Algernon Blackwood, Edwin A Abbott, Virginia Woolf, Ian Miller, Doug Johnson, Stanisław Szukalski, Peter Doig, Rebecca Solnit, Deleuze and Guattari, Marshall McLuhan, Alan Sillitoe, Tom Robbins, Kodwo Eshun, Brian O’Nolan, Ernest Hemingway, more record sleeves than you can imagine plus a host of other artists whose work I can see but whose names I can’t, and poured it drunkenly into a running zine.

I haven’t had an art or an English lesson since I was 12 or 13 or something – I went straight to work after school and didn’t think to pick up a pencil for years – and while I’m sure that particular tale will tell itself from somewhere back behind the lines, I hope that lack doesn’t eat and waste your precious time (and all time is precious, is it not?) too quickly.

The running zine is printed at random intervals (the art takes ages, but its not often more than a 3 month wait) and it’s printed by Hot Metal Press up in Barnsley. The art prints are all on fine art cotton stock and they come from Untitled Print Studio here in Sheffield. You may recognise my writing from Like The Wind magazine, and if that’s the case, please do go and buy hardcopy, real world media from them.

Much of my work comes from being outdoors in the landscape and the elements, and by trying to channel some of my subconscious into art that comes from what I’ve seen, felt and misunderstood there. Sometimes what comes through me is accurate and sometimes its surreal and often its a combination and not really either. For the pencil drawings I use mechanical pencils, an eraser and Bristol board. For the bright, coloured paintings I usually use Clip Studio Paint – and most of that work is done with the mapping pen or sometimes with the oil painting brush (I don’t tend to mix the brushes in a single work at all: I only use the one). Occasionally I’ll use ink and water or watercolour.

Being self-taught is an ongoing process, which is why I lime it I think. It’s ongoing – the end gets further and further away, the more you look for it – and I’m free to choose whatever blind alleys or werid backstreets I want to look down or wander along for my zines and prints. I usually describe the stranger side of my work as “surreal nature art” or just “surreal art” but I don’t really know if that’s an apposite label. It seems so to me, but I haven’t been to an art class to tell me otherwise. Perhaps just “nature art” or “what comes naturally to me” is better.

For some reason that I can’t quite get into words, a lot of my art – maybe “output” is better – comes from running in the Peak District. I don’t know why being outside in the landscape fills up my insides with so many pictures and ideas, but it does. Not all of them are about Nature, but all of them are absolutley from it. Even the rain and the fog get into me and encourage things out of me. I live in Sheffield so the Peak District isn’t far away; and neither are big fell runs and races; you can probably find me at a couple of the longer ones several times a year – the short ones are injury factories and it takes a lot to make do a shift in one today.

I love the hills, I love the woodlands and I love the rain and the sky and I love stories and I love writing and love drawing and yeah, well, you get the idea.

If this concatenation of sentences and ideas has somehow whetted your appetite for more information about me, you can find it here.

You can find the latest issue of the running zine here and the art prints here.

I don’t use AI.