Posts Tagged ‘Ink & Mess’

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.

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