CHRONICLES archives the successive newsletters.
...Makes John a Dull Boy. This last week has been a week of overtime and malicious deadlines lurking in wait (like the ones that live under the basement stairs when you’re a kid, with tentacles). Between camping out at the scan shop and wearing down my brushes....
Or Where Truth is Hopefully At Least As Entertaining As Fiction… This must be a standard film director’s phrase: “That was great! Perfect, movement, lights, everything. Excellent! Can you do it again? Oh, and don’t look at the camera this time.” Being part of a...
Or Where I Finally Make a Lasting Impression… It’s not every day that somebody makes a decision to tattoo a piece of artwork they like on themselves, or at least I don’t imagine so. My work seems rather too narrative to work as tattoos; I don’t draw enough roses,...
Or All About Drawers and Dreams… Once upon a time, I had the ambition of actually writing (and while building castles in the air, of actually getting someone else to illustrate) a children’s story, the initial idea growing out of a portion of a picture I had done for...
Or the Fine Art of Picking Up by Putting Down… Not so long ago, I bumped into an art school colleague, or so I thought… Little did I suspect it was the devil - or at least one of his many advocates - in disguise. Here’s the conversation: “So what are you up to these...
Or What You See is What You Get…. Last weekend, while my son and I were waiting to go up to the top of Notre-Dame de Paris (like good tourists, absolutely, I’ve always been drawn despite myself to France’s great remodeller of the Middle Ages, Viollet-le-Duc, and...
Or the Amusing and Ambiguous Exercise of Signing Sessions Rule number one: signing books is fun. (Establishing rule number one firmly in your mind is useful after several hours, when you can barely spell complicated names like “Fred” or “John”, and someone with an...
The vastest things are those we may not learn. We are not taught to die, nor to be born, Nor how to burn With love. How pitiful is our enforced return To those small things we are the masters of. Mervyn Peake, 1950 MERVYN PEAKE (1911 - 1968) I am totally under the...
Or In Others’ Words… Welcome to FIT TO PRINT. The portfolio’s new section is ultimately intended as a full on-line archive of articles printed over the years. For now it is very much under construction, but since Dom cooked up such a pretty customised PDF icon, I just...
Or An Unexpected Party… The Berlin premiere was wonderful fun - one always gets swept up in things like this and everything is a blur. My memory will return when we get our photos back from the developers. But Paris, on the other hand, was most definitely a night to...
Or Driving Home from Middle-Earth Just returned from a press screening of the Return of the King this morning. I have several things to say: Definitely take Kleenex along. Definitely don’t get the king-size drink before going in. Definitely plan what you’re going to...
Or Why “Imagine” Minus Two Letters is Worth a Thousand Words… PARIS Out with Vancouver, in with Paris! No sooner is one show cancelled than a totally different one appears. “The Lord of the Rings: From Imagination to Image” will open at the Bibliothèque Nationale de...