3 British Illustrators - Luke Pearson, Tom Gauld, Judith Kerr

1. Luke Pearson - Luke Pearson is a British comic artist working for NoBrow, he currently lives in Nottingham (where I'm from!). While Pearson is probably best known for his fantasy series, Hilda and the Midnight Giant etc., it's his autobiographical and personal work where you really see his "British-ness" shining through, covering topics ranging from the anxieties about very trivial things, to the way in which we often look down on the lives of other people when given very little information about them.

Image from Some People by Luke Pearson, 2010, self-published

2.

2. Tom Gauld - Tom Gauld is primarily a comic artist, but I first came across his work in a copy of Ted Hughes' The Iron Man, and maybe that's why I relate him to Britishness, because of that association to a piece of work by such a great British storyteller. In his comics, Gauld's work is often humorous, this humour usually coming from the mundane in a setting where it isn't expected, for example, in one comic (from Gauld and Dimon Lia's comic, Both) a knight sets out on an epic quest that takes days, only to return to the castle and be scolded for forgetting to pick up a pint of milk on the way.

Image Source: http://www.cabanonpress.com/Gallery/gallery27-IMCover.htm

2. Judith Kerr - I had already read The Iron Man before I was given the Tom Gauld copy as a present, but unlike Gauld, Judith Kerr was introduced to me very early on. This is probably the most "British" illustrator on the list, having influenced so many children growing up in this country. Growing up, we had two very forgetful cats who were constantly getting themselves locked out and doing daft things, so the stories were easy for me to relate to, that and the Thomas family are such a good portrayal of the average suburban British family that there's something there for everyone to relate to.

Image Source: http://fallenstarstories.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/judith-kerr-turns-90.html

3 British Artists - David Jones, Grayson Perry

1. David Jones - I think of David Jones as an Illustrator, but since he classes himself as an Artist (and I am struggling to whittle down which of my favourite Illustrators I want to use!) he's on this list. Jones is an ex-lecturer from Central Saint Martins, and is based in his lovely stone studio in his garden in Beaumaris. One part of why I love David Jones' work so much is because of just how much joy his work brings to people, and how much fun you can tell that he gets out of making it, and also my family are from Anglesey, visiting Jones' garden studio and listening to him talk about his work during the Beaumaris open studios around Easter is one of the big highlights of my year.

 These images are from his Angels on Washing Lines exhibition at Oriel Yns Môn in Llangefni. If these funny little wooden figures don't make you smile on their own, then the story behind them certainly will:

"The brief was to create a piece that made use of this space. My starting point was a memory I have from early childhood. I must have been in my grandmother’s back garden. She was telling me about heaven; that heaven was in the sky, and that God and the Angels lived there. When I looked up to the sky all I could see was her washing on the line; pyjamas, shirts etc. all gesticulating wildly in the wind. In my child’s mind I must have conflated the two ideas."

Quote and Images from: http://www.davidjonesartist.com/index.htm

2. Grayson Perry - Okay, so maybe this is a bit of an obvious choice, but there are few artists who have covered the peculiarities of Britishness as well as Grayson Perry has. This image is one of the tapestries from his series on the class system and how it affects us in the modern world - the characters he created in this series were stereotypes based around people he'd met from all kind of walks of life.

Image Source: My own photo, taken at the exhibition in the Victoria Miro, July 2012

Ten Things

University has challenged me to come up with 10 images that I find interesting and inspiring, so here we go!

1. Before and after shots of monks at the Maha Kumbh festival. I originally came across this image in a copy of The Guardian (although this image has been sourced from The Huffington Post). These are Hindu Holy Men who have been ritually shaved during the Maha Kumbh Festival at Sangam and I picked this photo because I've always been fascinated by human faces and I just love their expressions and the way that their faces seem to pop out from the photo (also, spectacular beards in the first row of photos!)

2. Paintings from the Chauvet Cave in Southern France. The Chauvet Cave was first discovered in late 1994 and what's so amazing about it is that the artwork found in these caves is from the Aurignacian period, but displays a level of skill far greater than any other artwork of the period, and it also depicts animals that the people living in the area at the time couldn't have possibly seen. The other thing that fascinates me about this cave is that there was also a small amount of evidence found from the Gravettian period, (about 5000 years later than the Aurgnacian) evidence of smoke from a torch and a lone child's footprint. Just imagine how magical this must have seemed to the child who discovered it all those thousands of years ago.

Source: http://www.empowernetwork.com/brunotrevino/blog/chauvet-cave-paintings/

3. I've always been drawn to abandoned places (Pripyat is very high on my list of places I'd like to visit!) so it isn't surprising that I'm drawn to this photo of an abandoned water park. I love the idea of nature where it shouldn't normally be, and the way that the plastic has chipped and faded, it's a great image!

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lenzz/9366284434/in/pool-708642@N25/

4. This is a spread from Nate Simpson's comic Nonplayer. I love the level of detail in Simpson's work, but I chose this particular image because of the way he's merged these two very different worlds that you'd think would jar with each other when placed together the way they are, but his use of palette and perspective just makes them work. I'd love to be able to create work like this.

Source: http://blog.comixology.com/tag/non-player/

5. I could easily dedicate an entire blog entry to Victo Ngai, maybe I will do? Let's just stick with this image for now. Like the previous image, I just love how much detail Ngai puts into her work, and her use of colours, the fact that not all of the lines are in the same colour, in this image, how they turn to red in the place where you should be looking. I love that everything else in this image is textured with scribbles, apart from the floor and the rhino, and the expression on his face is wonderful, it really tells a story (I reckon he was meaning to meet up with a good friend he hasn't seen in a while and they just haven't showed, and he's travelled a long way to get to the meeting point, so it would be a waste to just go home now)

Source: http://www.thefoxisblack.com/2010/08/02/victo-ngai/

6. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be an either astronaut, Michael Schumacher (don't ask), an explorer or an architect, preferably all four at once, with two of those things in mind, it's easy to see why this image stuck out to me. This is from Tallmadge Doyle's Celestial Mapping series, and there are a few versions of the same image, where the focus changes depending on how the ink has been applied and the colours used. I love maps and I love space, and I love how this looks like what I'd imagine a Victorian astronaut's map to look like, covered in scribbles and somewhat damaged by the voyage, there's a story there.

Source: http://www.tallmadgedoyle.com/celestialmapping1.htm

7. (My scanner has butchered this one a bit, sorry!) Now this one's a bit different, because it's not so much the image that I'm inspired by (it's a perfectly decent photo, nothing special) but more that it serves as a reminder to always enjoy what you're doing and the way you go about doing it, I'd be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who looked as pleased as Brian Cox does with his sandcastle here. And that brings up another point, to always be on the lookout for inspiration, new ways to explain things using objects you wouldn't expect, this image was part of an explanation of entropy, the sand castle wearing away in the wind as a metaphor for how the process works. So thanks for that Brian, teaching me about physics and inspiring me to think differently.

Source: Wonder of the Universe by Professor Brian Cox & Andrew Cohen, HarperCollins, 2011

8. More abandoned places I'm afraid! This is an abandoned bunker (I think it's somewhere in Russia) and looking at this photo and the others in the set just makes me imagine all sorts of weird subterranean creatures that might live down there, creatures that are not biological in their make-up. I just want to go and draw creepy monsters now! There are more photos of this bunker on the website, they are well worth a look through!

Source: http://englishrussia.com/2012/12/23/the-abandoned-undeground-city/

9. Marian Churchland is one of my favourite comic artists, but as well as that she runs a blog with usual blog stuff as well as these lovely drawings of things she has and cool imaginary objects that she'd like to have (I mean who wouldn't want a bag of semi-useful objects for a space adventure?). It inspires me because although I do a lot of drawing on a daily basis (mostly from my head) I don't feel like I set aside enough time for just drawing stuff! Maybe that's something to aim for this year.

Source: http://hchom.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/package.jpg?w=500&h=888

10. I'll on this photo from the Isle of Skye, which has got me thinking about ancient travellers and fantasy stories, and how much I just want to be up there, trekking through the hills and the mist and drawing every desolate view and weird looking rock I can find. I wonder if there are dragons up on those rocks?

Source: http://500px.com/D_P_Photography