Cartoons, sketches, operas (OK only one opera) on everything from dead rabbits, private investigative bread and pergolas to musical deep-sea creatures, contrary cowboy vegetables and barren bees.
Ugh,late AGAIN!Keep meaning to have this up early on Friday so April gets to see it. My head is still spinning from last week so I am taking a break this week from Love & Carnage. I found this work in progress from quite a few years ago. I get bitten by midges, mosquitos and horseflies in summer and always have really bad reactions, huge swelling and lots of lovely pus and scabs. One time I was on a camping trip in west Scotand where the air is pure midges (I am not kidding) and someone left the tent open and I ended up looking like I had leprosy. I had to go straight to a set design job in Inverness where I was staying in a pre booked B&B. Couldn’t understand it when the landlady kept asking me if I wouldn’t be happier staying somewhere else until one of the crew said she was afraid of catching whatever I had. Another time arrived at a volunteer camp for saving vultures in Croatia with a scabby weeping face. Happily no one said anything. Vultures are not picky. I was very picky.
I have occasionally tried and failed to get my irritation at biting insects and my idiot immune system into a ‘toon. And this fails too. I can hardly understand it myself (so Fraggle don’t worry!) which is why I didn’t publish it I guess. It needs more work. I need to make the last ‘panel’ – with the squirty pus – larger and colour and make it more obvious my immune army are piling up under the skin.
I often find that things that really really annoy me rarely make good ‘toons or at least I have to get some distance from those things and I rarely get distance from mosquitos.
I think what I was intending that by the time my immune system was responding the mosquito in question was long dead. I don’t mind things that make sense ie if you get injured it hurts so you know you have to get it sorted but the hysterical delayed reaction to bites is ridiculous. And itching apparently is the only sensation that they cannot find a rational reason for. See. Annoying.
Lates AGAIN. As theres only a few of us read this I thought I would do a Fraggle style update as its been a weird week, a weird time really, this last year. Lots of big ups and big downs… Cycled the last of the Waterford Greenway (OK that’s mostly flat) with my brother on Sunday, Dungarvan back towards Durrow. We have been doing these excursions together for the last while and they are really enjoyable. Its an amazing facility to have here.
My Dads 90th was on Tuesday and we had a low key celebration at a local restaurant and I got a special cake made. I don’t usually organise stuff and though it was a small do I had a lot of stress about whether it would turn out OK. This was compounded by the restaurant doing an about turn on allowing us to bring the cake in the day before the meal. Cue major migraine that turned me half blind. I stayed calm and it turned out it was a misunderstanding and all went off swimmingly.
On the down side, still looking for some regular work to pay things like rent and food and silly stuff like that so when someone asked me to do some work for free this week it sent me a bit mental. Artists are always asked to work for free or donate work for free. How about asking the frigging billionares and working your way down people? Even the bankers the business owners, the plumbers!No, they always ask the poor artists first. It’s even worse when the request comes from someone who is drawing down a full salary underwritten by arts funding – guess who never gets a salary from arts funding? Yeh, artists. So that really pissed me off and also made me feel that my peers think I am of little value. These requests give my fragile confidence a kicking. So I made a little Instagram post about that…
Then I got rejected for a big project for 2025 which I thought I had a chance with and my proposal was damn cool but, thems the breaks and I got over it in about two minutes. I do so many applications I am getting really good at dismissing rejections though I suspect they can have a cumulative effect. I was also turned down for another group show open call this week but that’s OK as the gallery in question is a bit up itself. There was also a brief email kerfuffle about an artist in residence project this July. A grant to underwrite it is not materializing and as I am out of a job and the residency is demanding payment up front added to which there was some misunderstanding about the timing of it, things are getting a bit fraught. But I’ve been working on being in the moment and trusting that things will be fine and got it all mostly smoothed out.
On the upside I recently had a painting selected for a new prestigious open call which opened at our local Big House, Mount Congreve (I call it Mount Conger Eel) last night. This was a bit of coup for me as my piece was experimental in that it was a painting that I set fire to….
The theme was Bucolica and I chose to present this as a warning of forest fires. Here’s the Blurb.
Title: 40 to 41% 40% was the predicted increase of wildfires for Mediterranean Europe at 1.5 degrees in 2018 (1). 1.5 degrees was breached between February 2023 and January 2024. 41% of areas burned in 2023 in the EU were in the European Diversity Reservoir of Natura 2000 (3). February 2024 was the warmest on record (2). In 2024 the incidence of wildfires is already double the average for this time of year (3). That’s 100% increase. In the interests of the viewer, only 40 to 41% of this painting has been burned. 1.Turco et al, in Nature, October, 2018. 2.Copernicus, March, 2024 3.EFFIS April 10th 2024.
Even better, when I arrived at the opening last night I was told someone had bought it. Whoop! I sold another painting at another group show up the country last month so I am feeling good about my painting which I have been working on and my fragile confidence was boosted once more. Then, fast on the heels of the up, another down. I approached a close friend who hasn’t had a lot of time for me this last year or so and she started spitting so much fire at me you could’ve lit your cigarette off her face. Is my ‘fire painting’ magic somehow? Her husband is not talking to me either but apparently that’s a whole other issue. I would tell you what their problem was if I knew but this whole turn from being two of my bestest friends to my mortal enemies happened in what seemed to me to be their elective absence from my life. So that’s all very confusing and bizarre. I do know that last year was not easy for me and I’ve been making changes in my life and I have been busy with work, college, family stuff and stress – maybe I wasn’t supposed to do all that? Deary me. What to do? Fuck ’em I guess. Not in the good way.
This morning I attended a really good (free – even better) masterclass in organising my life as part of the yearlong (OK lifelong) effort to get some structure going in my life. This class was so good I feel I may accidentally rid myself of even more bad friends. Something to look forward to! And this afternoon I took myself off on a cycle down the coast. It was meant to be a ‘cycle of rage’ to burn off my annoyance but it was actually very enjoyable.
And so – I have just realised why I needed to write all that – because its been a much more hectic week for my poor soul than I realised. Is Mars in retrograde or WTF? But barring a brief rant at my sister about the general horribleness of people (it was brief because my sister rather too much enjoys pointing out that I might be horrible too. Sisters!) I have kept my head all week and worked through everything as it happened. This is an unprecedented achievement for me – rejections, misunderstandings, family gatherings, failures, work devalued, crazy angry people – I think I am reaching some sort of zen. Or maybe I don’t give much of a fuck any more. Either way, all good.
And I am ending the mad week on an up – this afternoon, another couple I know (and who don’t currently hate me) invited me to dinner (mexican, my favourite!) on their yacht this Sunday. Nature abhors a vacuum as they say. Speaking of which, yes finally the ‘toons. I like these two as stand alones – that is they don’t feature the usual characters (me mostly) and in the book they’ll serve to break up some of the pages I think. I changed the font. See what you think. Thanks for reading, I feel much better now 😀
I am starting to get bored with Love and Canage so I will try and get the book together soon as I am itching to get onto other ‘toons…
Blimey I sort of missed last week. And nearly missed this one. And have not boomed the stats I e meant to and Bored of a Record Shop is filling up my email 😁 Dunno where my head is.
This one is one of the first ‘relationship’ ‘toons I did and I still love it. In fact this is an updated version from a while back and I don’t think I’ll change it much for the book. Except maybe the font.
I’ve also realised I haven’t got that many ‘toons on divorce, and breakups and the like (yes a few on being dumped but they are more suited to the dating part I think – so I’ll have to put on my thinking cap. And if y’all have any ideas or stories, let me know!
I promised a preview. Thought I could do this as a slideshow but can’t see the option but if you click on the image you can follow on from that. This is about half the book and some images still need a bit of editing but its more or less there. I am organising them in the order tat relationships happen – dating, breaking up, marrying/moving in etc. I am thinking of doing some pages either in a block colour (if the book is colour) or black or grey (if its in black and white) like the cross dresser page. Perhaps this can be a divider between different parts of the book. Anyway let me know what you think!
Here’s another one that needed trimming. See original below. I was riffing on well-meaning advice from smug marrieds so the blowing hot and cold joke was just not needed. It’s much better now though I do like that look inside Brian’s head. But I think Brian could be drawn better maybe? With more contrast?Is it obvious he’s an orangutan? That he’s picking his nose?
I did promise a look at the book layout though I have not done what I wanted to before I show a sample. So -next week! And I am falling behind on booming all your stats. Expect me soon!
This is an odd one. I don’t really get the second part of it – something to do with dating trees which I may make another ‘toon out of. I have a bad tendency to get overexcited and tag ‘extra bits’ on or not spend the time ironing out an idea. I do this in my artwork too and I call it my ‘too muchness’. I often wonder that, if my ‘too muchness’ is me, why can’t I keep it? That can work for big weird artworks but for ‘toons I think clarity is better. So I have chopped off the last panel and changed the text. I might put a couple of policemen into the last image instead of diners.
I also started putting together the book this week and I am sort of excited about that too. I had been thinking about using the same font throughout – probably because of the same neuroticism that is obsessed with cleaning up my ‘style’ – and was going to ask which one you thought was best. But in putting the first ten pages of the book up, not only do the diverse styles work but diverse fonts do too – excepting the less readable ones. I think thats what you guys have been trying to tell me all along! There is still a bit of work to do, cleaning up images, rewriting some jokes and also rejigging panels so they fit on a book page. While as April said the titles arent necessary I may add a few lines of text here and there to give them some cotext but I am seeing lots of possibilities now and I am really happy I started to review them this way. Your help, my friends, has been invaluable. I will show you a preview of the first pages next week.
Fonts: I thought I had used three over the course of the years, maximum, but turns out I have used about six -along with my own handwriting. They are laid out on the updated ‘toon below. Let me know which one you like best. There are two of them I am definitely not going to use but not sure about the others yet..
Speaking of styles, this one probably falls close to the ‘intricately planned, drawn and hand coloured in pieces’ I mentioned a few posts back and the characters are more more realistic in style than most of my ‘toons. Some of these ‘toons riff on historical or political issues, reflecting some of my interests (for ‘interests’ read ‘rant food’) while mushing things together in ridiculous way, like this one on Ogham Stones. The other big difference here is that it is narrated rather than using dialogue. There’s one on Otzi the Iceman for example, which was a long riff on that Ice man’s reconstruction complete with his death pose. I think that one confused people and might possibly confuse me now.
This one is much clearer – I think I had been reading about new research into neolithic male and female roles at the time – but as its focus is more about history than dating it may not go into the Love & Carnage book (Yes I think I’m going to go with Fraggle’s suggestion!). Let me know what you think. I think Deirdre’s cool. I haven’t done any editing at all on this or even looked at it properly because I have a rotten cold this week.
Late Again!I’ve started posting mideweek as the ‘toons are coming thick and fast (literally) at the moment but it’s making me forget when its Friday. Doesnt help that I’m out of work. Or that I was in the pub last night….The plan at this point was to post the old ones along with the update. I am falling behind on that though I have done a quick bit of work on this. I mean to create a book file in Word soon and send it out to my select Beta readers – you know who you are.
This is an early one and it needed some editing. The older version is below. I haven’t settled on a typeface/font yet but I like this one and I think its good to differentiate the dialogue from the…grunting! I took the title out. I started putting the blog title into the images for posting on facebook, before I was blogging properly. The drawing is OK actually, me trying to be neat. My style loosens up later though I still revert to to this style too. I always loved pink and purple as a kid and they often appear in earlier ‘toons. The argyll tank top often appears on the boyfriends. My mother loves those kind of chaps and in the past, if she saw me even near one, she would say to me after, ‘wouldn’t he do?”. Needless to say I ran/run a mile from them. I hated the missing ears in the second panel – my wonky ears in effect missing in real life. You can see at the left edge which is grey that I didnt crop the scan properly. And perhaps the idea needs a little work?Is it clear?Makes me laugh but then I am one of the weird ones…
It’s happening again. The ‘toons. I dont think its really because I restarted the blog though that’s a part of it. It’s more because I feel both more energised by leaving a job that was making me unhappy and perhaps the stress of being jobless – though in truth I don’t feel stressed, god knows why. Maybe because I am putting lots of plans into action. If I can just stop cartooning…
Anyway here’s another one. If there are any youngsters out there hoping that when you get old you won’t have to put up with people acting like children – forget it. I seem to regularly cause people to stop talking to me for reasons I am unable to fathom. Getting real tired of it now. As Jerry Seinfeld says, ‘People. They’re the worst.’ The good thing about being old is that while this is annoying, I don’t care that much.
Monster in the Next Room 
