Drawing, Walking, Making Marks

I

At the start of this year, I went for a walk.

I walked out of my final group CBT session in Brierley Hill, past the college, and began making my way down the hill. For the previous 12 sessions throughout the final months of 2019, I had gotten the bus straight away from up t’road, back down to Merry Hill, before getting another bus to Cradley Heath station, a train from there to Birmingham Moor Street, and walked through Digbeth into work. Today was different as it was a follow up session in the new year, taking place on the first Monday in January, and I didn’t need to go into work. This meant there was space to really exhale, to engage in processing the psychological distance travelled in therapy and let a range of emotions walk alongside me.

I had packed my camera with me, and snapped some things that interested me on the walk, past a combination of residential and industrial use sites and a great view of the Dudley Number One canal, continuing down past KFC and the ODEON cinema, where, unusually, I stopped to enjoy a rare frothy coconut milk coffee alone in the cafe. As the chair held my body like a mother holds a child, I could almost swear I felt the world spinning gently beneath me as I stared softly into the space around me, alongside a constellation of other people also drinking frothy drinks, eating overpriced toasted sandwiches and staring into the spaces between us.

Greatest Hits: March

The story of Rodriguez single-handedly inspired the theme for my calendar this year. If you haven't checked out the Searching For Sugar Man documentary all about him then I'd urge you to give it a watch! He's a humble, talented icon whose music never gained popularity in America, but people spread it around via taped recordings and copied albums leading to a huge fanbase in South Africa that he had no idea about until decades later.

"GREATEST HITS"

“Music is my beach house, music is my home town
Music is my king size bed, music’s where I meet my friends.”
— Cansei de Ser Sexy

Following last year’s calendar about something I find most challenging, I decided to theme this edition around something I adore, find freedom in and lean on when things get real - music.

I almost gave up multiple times on being able to make anything calendar-shaped for 2020. After 5 years of producing these you'd think it may have gotten easier, but 2019 was my greatest challenge yet. I didn't want to give up, so instead kept finding ways to still make the calendar happen despite my critical lack of energy at the end of last year, soundtracking one of the busiest times of my life as we closed Impact Hub Birmingham.

A New Year's Resolve

How do folks and welcome to my wee blog. It's so late on Sunday night that it recently became Monday and, unfortunately, it's less socially acceptable to not know what day it is from approximately, now. Things are gearing up around us as we move gently into all that this year has in store, and me and my laptop are getting reacquainted enough to pen (well, cursor) a little something to mark the occasion, and say a public hello to 2020.

Weirdly, I think if I was inclined to do a year-in-review style rundown of 2019 it would probably be my most exciting year to date. I travelled to attend Glasgow Zine Festival for the first time, visited Brooklyn Art Library in New York supported by a-n, went to Copenhagen, tabled at the dreamy Dundee Zine Festival, held Brum Zine Fest for the second year running, organised an artists residency, organised events and exhibitions, got featured on the BBC, got interviewed at the House of Illustration, worked on some amazing brand projects, campaigns and documents and ultimately levelled up professionally, much of which happened in the final months of the year.

An Artist, Emerging

Hey folks, and welcome to another blog post about *feelings*. Please keep your hands and arms inside the tab at all times as we don’t want you to inadvertently catch them. Here's a patch I embroidered at North West Zine Fest.

I’m quite honoured that your eyes are falling on my blog today; a place that, for an illustrator, feels quite thin on the illustration content. I guess writing here almost acts as a way to contextualise and explain that, but I’d also love to return to scrapbooking more and sharing drawing in a more online-journal-type way rather than hanging around on instagram. Honestly, I think this post is a precursor to more of that, and more drawing generally, so thank you for bearing with me over the years, particularly as I express feelings of being lost every couple of months without even making that many nice new pictures to sweeten the pill.

What Kills Creativity?

I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but my practice is dying.

Despite its relatively healthy exterior it's something I've suspected for a while and have begun applying various holistic approaches to soothe and calm it — the odd hard-fought personal project here and there, writing personal development funding bids in my head in a dream-like state, staying up all night drawing for ink-fucking-tober. In the last few years I've swung everywhere between thinking I NEED TO QUIT MY JOB IMMEDIATELY AND JOIN THE ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL and Oh well, it's actually fine, I can draw when I'm old! I'll enjoy that...

Like, I think I most recently started to make peace with the fact it was dying — sad and confused, sure — but accepting, like the final scene of Lord of the Rings as the lads wave Frodo off on his little boat.

Over the last few weeks the urgency of my personal work as part of the #ArtistsMeanBusiness residency I've set up at Impact Hub Birmingham this month has become clear. This is going to take more than a nice bath and some ointment, it's going to require some fundamental diagnosis and probably a bit of surgery. I've been writing trying to make sense of all of this like a person possessed this week so far. Using an exercise from d-school, I am now in the process of assessing the condition of my practice, and what I can do to treat it before it’s too late.

One Extraordinary Thing

If you could do one extraordinary thing, what would it be?

It's 2am and I'm listening to Lou Reed's Transformer album (a Christmas present from my pa), doing a pretty ordinary thing for me at this hour of writing a phrase down on a post-it note and thinking - there is something in this; or rather, here we go again, there's something in me. It's like a kind of itchy thought that makes me get out a fresh sheet of paper or a notebook or in this case, go straight to my fucking blog like Carrie fucking Bradshaw.

So, hi, and welcome to this new and exciting episode of Baked Beans & the City.

I Am Afraid of Nothing

These words still blaze down from my bedroom mirror in my family home, and I used to consider them every morning as I psyched myself up to leave the house. Torn from the front cover of an old UWE prospectus, the phrase I Am Afraid of Nothing has always been almost amusing to me in how far it is from the truth, but it's also been something I try and live by despite being a very naturally anxious person with a busy, rarely peaceful brain.

孤独 (Solitude): A Zine

Following on from my previous post about making time for making, I'm excited to share the spoils of my Riso Residency at Rabbits Road Press: a 20pp A5 zine by the name of 孤独 (Solitude). Solitude -- reader, reader -- solitude. Whilst intending to make a zine about my journey to the Japanese islands of Naoshima and Teshima, as I began to go through all the tickets and maps and photographs and notes from my time there I realised that making sense of all of that information was only part of this story, and the themes I drew out became much more about adventure, memories and spending time alone, focusing in on personal feelings and anecdotes.

We Need To Talk About Byng Inc.

Hey folks, and welcome back to the Byng blogsphere.

It's been a while.

4 months in fact.

I can tell you this with confidence because the only thing I seem to design these days happens to be calendars, although you'd never know it from the sporadic nature of my posts throughout any given year. I can see a 'time to get a watch' type joke in there somewhere, to sit merrily alongside the other kinds of fun I'm lovingly poking at myself at the moment, in pursuit of recovering from my act of, seemingly, going creatively missing.

Let's investigate.