Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Ink & Mess: Mine’s a kind of default drive to create caused by weird brain wiring. My brains are far too unconventional, too everywhere and too awkward to use them for anything other than a creative outspill of mess. The way I process the mess is with pens and whatever I find to draw on. The stuff that inspires me is old stuff, dead stuff, rickety, creepy crawly stuff, funny stuff and forgotten stuff. I like to mix all the stuffs up in my brain then use the hands at the end of my arms to draw all the things I have imagined. I spend hours pawing over things that other people don’t really want; broken automata, things found in shut down fairgrounds, old toys in dusty attics, mutations at the back of my grandmothers
larder. I like to take these things, things that aren’t always conventionally accessible and attractive and make them into weird and wonderful drawings.
The biggest drive is the end result: to create an illustration, or a scene with a narrative, you can communicate anything you want without ever having to say much at all. From the tiniest detail to the loudest expression, it can all be said in one go. What a powerful way of communicating!

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it
has helped you or hindered you?
IM: I used to sit in class at school drawing on a sketchbook on my lap hidden under
the table. I’d draw caricatures of all my other class mates and then hand them out at the end of the day. I didn’t really enjoy anything at school other than home time and art time. I hated being told what to do and
just couldn’t fathom the purpose of hierarchical school structure, all I wanted to do was to create and have fun. Quite a reasonable expectation in the mind of any primary school kid, I’m sure. Although I liked art lessons, I didn’t like working to a brief or class project, so again, even in the only class I liked it was sketchbook under the table time. And that pretty much led me to the conclusion that drawing was what I wanted to do, not painting or ceramics, because while I couldn’t smuggle a clandestine paintbrush or
potters wheel under the table, I could do a pen and sketchbook. That was all the formal training I had in art until I reached my twenties. Later on in life I decided I really needed some help and guidance from the people I had shunned in my more truculent days – teachers. I took two terms of Book Illustration at Chelsea Arts School and it helped me very much indeed. I had always thought that the purpose of tutors and the teaching system was to bash you about until you fit into the right shaped hole that they thought you belong in, but that wasn’t really the case. The reason I finally sought guidance from some formal training was not to get a good idea, but how to get that good idea seen and heard in a world that’s already brimming with good ideas. What art school did teach me about was what are necessary and unneccessary elements in my work, how to think progressively and work with the skills I have, and how to know when to stop and finish, or
perhaps rethink. Had I not been such an upstart as a youngster and stuck it through a formal education in illustration I suspect many more doors would have opened naturally for me. I sometimes feel like I have to go at those doors with a clawhammer, as for people outside of the umbrella of formal art school, locks appear on doors where there otherwise would be none.

CM: What mediums do you work in the most? Do you have a particular
brand that you love working with? Why do you use them?
IM: My usual tools are Rotring Artpens, Pilot V-Pens (before Pilot rebranded them with some kind of 1990’s design catastrophe), PITT artist pens by Faber Castell and different inks, mainly India ink and Windsor and Newton. I don’t really snub any pen, I’m still learning and currently trying out every
different kind of pen I can find. I have this brilliant sort of pen compendium book that I found in a dusty old bookshop, I’m working my way through all the dip pens and nibs they have listed in the book. I collect
pens and have a couple of lever fill fountain pens that I love, one in particular that was given to me recently has a beautiful spiral glass nib that produces delicate spidery lines as well as big fat accidental splats of
ink. I also love buying cheap fountain pens from non-specialist shops and just seeing what happens with them. I go to lots of flea markets in the UK and abroad to buy vintage nibs and dip pens, I have some still in their original packaging from yesteryear, complete with true 1950’s and retro Russian packet designs. Exciting stuff for a hoarder of ephemera.

CM: At what point did you realize that creating was going to be a large part of your life?
IM: Not so long ago I found a picture of me sat at a table in my Great Aunt’s house. I’m holding a pot of glue in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other and in front of me on the table is some kind of mental colourful creation I have made, an box-animal-beast of some sort. I look about four in that picture so I would say it was around that time that I thought creating would become the be all and end all of life as I know it. This is not just an assumed fact, there is yet more evidence! My grandmother has a large
collection of crap in her garden shed, and I do mean crap, that I made and entered into art competitions when I was younger. These things include one wellington boot covered in cut out butterflies, a mutant monkey with ten tails and a tin fairy with no head.

CM: If there was one style of art that you could take up, what would
it be?
IM: I only really want to be me doing what I do, because if I wasn’t me I’d want to be everyone else, and that would send me loopy. There’s so much brilliant stuff around these days, I guess it’s always been around but by the power of RSS I keep finding it day after day in my reader. I have
recently signed up to Wooster Art’s feed and have come across the most innovative and often breathtaking street art from around the world. Something that really melted my brain was the Blu street art animation
with the crawling, bubbling reproductive man puking out more and more men. I must have watched it ten times or more in a row. Apart from that example and amazing 30 foot high street work, usually if there’s something I don’t do that I’d really love to do, I’ll try it out and see how it works for me.
I am particularly interested in mask and marionette making at the moment and am about to have a go at that. If it’s a disaster it can only ever be a good thing, a monster will be created! If it’s not a disaster, hopefully it’ll be a winner.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
[Ed.'s Note: This video (MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU) is fantastic, if you haven't seen it already you simply must watch it. If you've seen it before, watch it again.]

CM: How do you deal with creator’s (or writer’s) block?
IM: When I get stuck it generally affects every single thing I do, it is a total nightmare. I find myself a victim of repeatedly running into the same wall over and over and often forget that if I were to look left or right I might see an exit. In many ways my obsessive need to keep ploughing on in the same direction is entirely useful, in other ways, like when creator’s block looms, it is a hangman’s noose. The solution to creators block is to take a walk and try to switch off. Eventually you pull yourself out of it.
No good for deadlines, but forcing yourself to think out of the block is not going to work either.

CM: How do you prepare for art shows where your work will be shown?
IM: The art shows I have been involved in thus far have been rather simple for me.There has always been a curator or organiser to do all the stuff at the art space. My part, all the stuff that leads up to my work being featured in the show, that is usually as simple as anything. I make the work, they take it. That said, there are two solo show projects I have in mind at the moment and they are pretty much eating me alive. One involves thousands of hand decorated marionettes and the other is a fairly straightforward show but even relatively simple things to do with precise organisation set me afloat in a sea of anxiety.

CM: How do you define you style? Does it represent an inner you or
something completely different?
IM: Ink & Mess refers to the mess in my brain and the ink I use to get that mess out. I’m also Ink & Mess because I am impatient. My hand is quick and my ideas are too many that so often before I have finished the first piece of work I want to be on to the second. I thankfully have developed the good
habit of seeing all projects through, even if they take three times as long as they should because I have paused work on one to attend to another. I go back and forth between pieces of work and whatever happens, happens. Sometimes the work changes because I haven’t kept the continuum of time going throughout the work. It is rare that I am ever totally unhappy with my work because it builds itself up as it goes, if it doesn’t work out then it doesn’t work out. The inner me is one hundred percent represented in my
illustration style, not only in line, colour and subject but also the entire process from start to finish. Ink & Mess is also what I’d like the real world to look like – filled with garishly mismatched monstrosities of fun
and fiendishness.

CM: What kind of environment do you need to create in?
IM: One of the best things about being an illustrator is you can illustrate anywhere, at anytime with anything. Although I love to be surrounded by the things that are an expression of who I am, I don’t need those things to make me. I recently took a holiday in Puglia, Italy. The only beach that wasn’t
rammed was the one next to a marble factory. People turned their noses up at this ’substandard’ beach where the little crabs lazed on glittery marble and the backdrop was a giant marble lifting crane. It was a Mad Max beach, the best beach I’ve ever seen. I found great, smooth driftwood there, dried it out in the sun and spent the day drawing all over it. I illustrated it with stories of men and women who had lost their lives at sea. A brilliant holiday project. Another great memory of working in a fly by night creative
environment was when I went to Edinburgh to take part in Sandy Christie’s exciting Artoscopic Experiment, an art show in a old railway tunnel. I flew up to Scotland the night before where I’d already had some fat Copic pens and paper delivered to where I was staying, drew monsters and fiends on the pad overnight, cut up some boxes, stuck the drawing on the box shapes. The next day at set up time in the exhibition I borrowed some garden cane from Sandy, stuck the monsters to the cane and erected a creepy totem pole in
the tunnel. Those were two of my favourite little projects, both of them done in alien surroundings and on the fly.

Artoscopic Experiment photos:

CM: What does your workspace look like? (Pictures or a description
work for this one)
IM:

CM: What was your worst experience with art? And the best?
IM: My worst experience with art has happened more than once and is always the same. It only ever happens when I just don¹t get a feel for a brief and I try too hard to create something that just isn’t me. It¹s happened maybe two or three times and each time I’ve known my submission is just not
going to make the cut, or I will be asked to make alterations. I am never happy working like this, and the end result is always a laboured, uninspiring, dead on the page illustration. Those experiences give real credence to my favourite adage ‘Be who you are and be that well’. My best experience with art is always changing, there’s loads of best experiences! Above all the superficial success like being part of an exhibition at the V&A Museum in London and having my own custom Moleskine made, the best experience in art
is making new pictures everyday, from start to finish I can produce something that I want straight away. That and having people tell me they like my pictures, and that gives them something too, they are the best
experiences in art.

CM: What movies, books, music, etc get your creative juices flowing the
most?
IM: Picture books are my second best friends, my real best friend is an actual human, but picture books are the second best thing. I collect old picture books, chap books and periodicals and particularly enjoy nonsense verse and illustrations by Simon Drew, Quentin Blake, Edward Gorey and Hillaire Belloc. Guillermo Del Toro’s spanish language films excite me the most and make me want to draw all day. Tom Waits plays the soundtrack to my life.

CM: Do you think the internet, technology, media, etcetera are helping
or destroying the art world?
IM: I think that art is a shape-shifting progressive changeling that is created by and feeds from far too many outlets and mediums to ever be destroyed by them. The minute art is threatened by any medium it turns to another and shuns whatever is manipulating it in a bad way. In this way
the crowd also move and create a new base, a new world even. To answer the question I’d really need to know your definition of art and in what context it is being destroyed. Without a doubt with the internet and the rise of Web 2.0 in particular everyone can be an artist, a singer, designer, model, actress…whatever. It’s not just that the bar has been lowered, self-promotion is so accessible that there is no bar anymore. However, I am a firm believer and have faith in the idea that real valid goodness rises and the rest falls by the wayside.

CM: Aside from art what do you do with your time? Is there anything else that drives you or that you’re passionate about?
IM: I like things relating to dead stuff and the way we remember and commemorate dead stuff. Taxidermy, relics, mourning artefacts, shrines and anything graveyard related. When I am not drawing I lurk about in cemeteries, kirkyards and burial grounds taking pictures for my photographic archive called Favourite Graves. I collect mourning jewellery and effects. I also have an obsession with printed and handwritten ephemera and will take any tickets, labels, wrappers or notes you have going.

CM: Do you have any upcoming shows, events, releases, etc. you would
like our readers to know about?
IM: Print wise, I have just released a custom Ink & Mess Moleskine for Modofly, it features my signature Ink & Mess image the puking stick man. I am continuing my series of Sombre Songbooks, illustrated picture books based on legendary murder ballads and melancholy melodies. There are two other major projects I have going on, which seem to have been going on for ages, and will no doubt take up most of my time for the next five years! Ink & Masks is a mask and wall creation intended to delight and spook the minds of passers by. I am illustrating hundreds of character masks, all with unique illustrations, that will eventually make up an entire wall hanging of masks.
I am also working on a top secret project called Puppet Hive. You’ll have to keep checking back to my blog and website to find out news about that.

Ink & Masks:

Custom Ink & Mess Moleskine by Modofly:

For more information on Ink & Mess and her work, please check out these links:
Marie Louise Plum (Official Site)
Marie Louise Plum (Official Blog)
Inky Mess (Myspace)
Marie Louise Plum (Flickr)