ABOUT THE ZINE & THE ART

I’ve spent many, many days 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, numberless record sleeves and many, many other artists whose work I can see before me but whose names I can’t, and as a thankyou, I’ve fed them all gratefully into this website, a semi-regular running zine and some weird paintings.

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, despite times when I should have. I think that story will probably tell itself – the voice below the voice that lives between the lines – and I hope that it doesn’t make your precious time seem poisoned or worthless: all time is precious and its one of the most valuable things you can spend.

The running zine is printed at random intervals (the art takes a long time make, but its not often more than a 3 month wait) and it’s printed by Hot Metal Press 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. It’s worth it for the running stories and you won’t be disappointed by the writing or the art. A large and mysterious part of my work comes from trying to give a pleasing form to the winding streams of shape and colour that wander through me after being outdoors a while. I find it inspiring to be under the sun, within the rain and beneath a hillside.

All ideas are perfect when they’re inside your head, but when they come out they’re not; which is unnerving and tiresome in the short term, but fascinating thereafter and usually where the real work is. Sometimes you can spill blood out onto a blank page and feel like it’s importance and vitality is obvious, but after a day or so it becomes clear that the world will either ignore what you’ve done or find it funny and that it’s probably just another stain to add to your collection of stains. Such things have histories though and before long, a stain can come to look more like a map or even another land, a country or a continent to the right eyes.

Sometimes what comes through me is awkward, sometimes it’s accurate and sometimes it’s surreal and often it’s a combination of all of those things at the same time. 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 like it, I think. It’s ongoing – the finish line gets further away, bluer and bifurcates the more you look for it – and I’m free to choose whatever strange trails or weird backstreets I want to look down, explore or ignore 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 “whatever weirdness comes naturally and wants to get out and look around” is better.

I don’t know why being outside in the Peak District fills up my insides with so many pictures and ideas, but it does. Most of the U.K’s landscape does the same, truth be told, but I live next to the Peak District so its the Peak I usually go to when I want some inspiration. Not all of my ideas are about Nature, but all of them are absolutely from it. Rain, fog, sun, frost, birds, fog, ferns, moss, fish – all of it – seems to get into me and encourage things to form, grow and leave through words, pictures and pages.

You can often find me at the bigger fell runs and races. Running is to me an extension of everything I’ve outlined above, but with the added bonus of fitness, beautiful views, self-flagellation and a friendly community. The short races tend to be injury factories for me and it takes a lot to make me 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 – you get the idea.

If this concatenation of sentences and thoughts 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.

NEXT ZINE

The next fanzine will be about Cressbrook Dale. It’s two thirds written and the art is half way there. There’s a route in there you can follow, but you’ll probably need to read between the lines.

Out soon.