NOT ONE-TRACK-MINDED

One-track-minded people are those who achieve things - sometimes great things, sometimes terrible things. They are the ones you hear about because they'll have discovered something momentous or solved a problem nobody's ever solved or gone spectacularly insane or committed some particularly atrocious crime. Their locomotive brain drives them relentlessly along that one track they've chosen and doesn't stop at all the little stations along the way to have a coffee and a look around.

I am not one-track-minded, as my record shows. But I've always thought I should/would/could be if only I...um...stuck to one track. Oh yes, for short periods of time I can enter that zone where it's always four in the morning and breakfast is at nine pm and the outside world is really really outside and the mind is totally focused on the idea, the task, the problem. It's a marvellous zone to be in, exciting, challenging, even if it's totally obsessive and egocentric, shutting out anything and anyone who is a distraction. But I can't stay there, distractions rush in like noisy children, new tracks appear out of the blue - which one to follow? It's a fairground out there, irresistible and irrelevant distractions all over the place.

Know what I mean?

Anyway, I'll get back to La Vie en Rosé very shortly as soon as the deck is cleared of other unfinished business. Meanwhile my non-winning comic strip, along with other non-winners, is at Forbidden Planet, and there's a plan afoot to collectively publish a book of the non-winning graphic entries, a kind of Salon des Refusés. You can see some of the other entries on flickr here. Any Londoners interested in comics (ie sequential art: more sophisticated title) are very welcome to attend the next forum of Laydeez Do Comics on Monday 30th November, 6:30pm, details on their website. I'll be doing a short (10 minute) visual presentation there.

I've made a new section to post my POEMPICTURES . I was inspired by this new site.

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NOT THE WINNER

of the OBSERVER/CAPE GRAPHIC SHORT STORY COMPETITION

I knew my entry had no chance but I'm glad I took up the challenge. I agree that Vivien McDermid's story Paint with her lovely illustrations (published today in the Observer magazine section) deserved the prize but I haven't seen the other submissions.

Anyway, so as not to let it go to waste, herewith for your entertainment is the full strip I submitted to this competition. (CLICK ON IMAGES FOR LARGER VERSION)

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WOMEN IN COMICS CONFERENCE, CAMBRIDGE NEW HALL, 25 October 2009

Chuffed to discover that Sarah McIntyre has posted some of my sketches on her blog . She was one of the speakers at this conference which I was very glad to have been able to attend on my return from France. I am not at all qualified to review such a comics-erudite event since my relationship to comics is intermittent and I'm an outsider in the vast family of comics creators who work in this medium full time and have made their mark in it. The sequential format does interest me very much indeed and I want to explore it much further (in my always-to-be-continued graphic novel) but there's a great deal of activity and information related to comics culture that I tend to pass by, probably to my detriment.
http://www.dominique-goblet.be/

Having been an artists' book-maker for a long time, the creators I respond to most are those whose approach and ideas are in that vein and who use sequential images as part of their visual/verbal art practice rather than as comics per se. Pages filled with small frames, each loaded with tiny text and drawings, no matter how appealing the story or concept irritate my eyes and brain. I prefer layouts which spread over the available space, flowing in and out of consciousness as time itself does. Such an artist is Dominique Goblet whose work I was excited to discover at the conference. I saw some of her books on the tables and bought one immediately: Souvenir D'Une Journée Parfaite - atmospheric, quirky, melancholy and moving on different levels of time, space, memory and emotion, beautifully expressed in monochrome drawings and an evocative, scratchily handwritten text. Hearing her later in conversation with Paul Gravett (top right in the photos below) confirmed the impression that my concerns and aims were very much in tune with hers. We will keep in touch and I hope to visit her studio in Brussels some time.

About Paul Gravett, no praise can ever be too high: he is responsible for stimulating interest in comics, encouraging innumerable comics artists in the UK and elsewhere and writing about comics critically, perceptively and knowledgeably. Back in the 1980's when I was producing and self-publishing my mini-series The Augustine Adventures (Small Packages) Paul was one of the first to review them in his magazine Escape and he has always been supportive. I think he has a pair of wings tucked away behind his shoulder blades, enabling him to appear wherever and whenever comics creators are assembled, lighting up the place with his good will and open-minded attention.

Sarah Lightman (who organised the conference along with Dr. Laurence Grove of the University of Glasgow) is another artist I've recently met whose work resonates with me. An exhibition of her diary drawings, In Memoriam, is currently in New Hall, focusing on ordinary objects (packets of biscuits, lace, toothbrush etc.) sensitively drawn in pencil, as conduits for autobiographical reflection. Each image has a pithy caption which leads you out of the object represented and into the artist's mind as she was drawing it. Sarah, along with illustrator Nicola Streeten, recently founded Laydeez Do Comics , a forum focusing on comic works based on life narrative, meeting once a month. I went along to one meeting and will be back for more.

I could write more about the conference but I'm going to stop here as I want to post this and get on with where I left off before I disappeared to France.

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NOT BAD NOMAD

My hotel room balcony, Clamart.

I am back home but still floating in a nomadic space where 'home' is just the last bed you slept in and the last place you ate your breakfast. And despite the insecurity, strangeness and discomforts of that floating world, I must say it has its charm and its usefulness. For one thing it liberates you, temporarily, from the force of habit. Your time, your attention, your surroundings all undergo a transformation which may or may not be to your liking but it certainly kicks you in the inertia-zone and wakes up at least some of your somnolent neurons. I walked more, ate less, got up earlier, went to sleep earlier and thought less about myself than I have in a long time. Things which needed to be done got done and although a feeling of being a remotely-controlled robot occasionally surfaced, there were moments of zen-like discovery and intense engagement for which I am grateful.

My sister, continuing her astonishingly quick recovery, is going back to Rome with her daughter this week. They are together in Paris at the moment where Annie is enjoying her release from the prison, as she calls it, of hospital. I don't believe my presence was a factor in her speedy rehabilitation, she's got her own indomitable will for that. But maybe the old familiar rusty pattern of sisterly irritation takes on movement and meaning when seen out of an unfamiliar window.

Back a little later with report of the Cambridge Women in Comics Event which I attended on Sunday.

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THE FRENCH IN MOI?

I was born in France, my mother, her mother and father and everyone up and down that family tree were French, therefore something in me must be French, part of my bloodstream must taste of vin rouge and some of my brain cells must be tuned to the sound of the French voice. But non, ce n'est pas comme ça. I do not feel French, vin rouge gives me a headache and the sound of French voices speaking all at once sounds to me like chickens trapped in a cattle truck. The voices of Jacques Brel or Leo Ferré or Edith Piaf, that's another kettle of bouillabaise entirely. I can relate to those, absolument, and the same goes for Matisse and several others in the domains of art, literature or philosophy. I have a penchant for French intellectuals' bushy eyebrows and flowing hair (the men) and the women are beautiful, if too professionally made up. But in front of any French television programme, even those intelligent ones in which luminaries from various fields intelligently discuss serious issues, in five minutes I want to run screaming from the room. Or sitting in a café, listening to men standing at the bar talking in highly excited, combative tones about something or other, I feel like a visitor from another planet.

Complaining I can understand. Maybe that's the French gene in me. I am argumentative and a good complainer. Not for me the Anglo-Saxon embarassment about sending badly cooked food back to the kitchen, letting sleeping dogs lie and not rocking the boat. Those dogs had better wake up when I'm around and the boat rocks and rolls.

A fraught trip back to the hospital yesterday and a painful procedure for my sister to endure (is there anything worse then having tubes and instruments poked up your nostrils?) but things are calmer today. The weather has turned very cold and I didn't bring my winter coat.

HEADLESS BISHOPS AT BREAKFAST

The tables and chairs in the breakfast room at my hotel are wearing skirts, long golden yellow brocaded skirts. It looks like a gathering of headless bishops, an ecclesiastical convention imagined by the Surrealists. Surveying the scene from above is the always open eye of a television, pouring out old Disney cartoons dubbed in French, which makes the quacking and barking and squealing even more hysterical than in the native version. Plastic flowers and candles adorn the skirted tables. Breakfast is good: crusty baguette, croissant, butter, jam, orange juice, coffee.

Taking a shower is a daunting tour de force: if you make the fatal mistake of turning the hot tap on first, boiling water sprays you and the room from cracks in the long black rubber hose attached to the bath. Today the cold water tap fell off. There are no hooks to hang anything. Maybe the French have not yet discovered hooks. But I saw some of those suction ones in the Super U yesterday and if I were staying longer I'd buy a sackful and stick them everywhere.

I love this hotel. The friendly Moroccans who appear to be running it are philosophical about Things That Don't Work As They Should (c'est la vie) and will fix them almost as soon as possible.

My sister is definitely better. Yesterday we went for a walk in the streets around the clinic and today we'll do a longer walk. Mood has improved along with la santé. Please may it continue to be so.

THIS IS WHERE I AM NOW

Some photos of Clamart, a small town in the region called the Hauts- de- Seine where my sister is sitting, bored and fed up in a convalescence clinic and where I like my hotel room.
CLICK ON PICS FOR MUCH BIGGER VIEW.