A 2023 Review (Madeleine memories)

Memories Are Made Of This

The year 2023 had a quite gloomy start for the art scene. The coldest Winter for several years, combined with a 'cost of living crisis', and ACE funding slashed for many UK arts organisations, left the arts community feeling quite bruised.

Promotional image for the madeleine zine, with a list of contributors (including myself)

My initial sense of artistic salvation came via Mastodon, the Fediverse micro blogging service that I joined last year (see previous post). On this site, I discovered a lively arts and writing community. The latter led me to re-start reading a book that had been lying idle on my shelves, called The Artists Way. Whilst this book isn't really about contemporary art, it is all about turning on the creativity tap and restarting the flow of creative output. When I found a few writers talking about it online, I decided to give the process another go. This led me to try out the 'morning pages' exercises, to get my creativity restarted. 

My aim was to create more artwork but I soon spotted a writing opportunity that was just up my street. It was to write a short piece for a one-off zine on the topic of memories and comics, which was also fundraising for dementia support. I loved my experience of comics fandom many years ago, when I was actively part of it, and the fundraising aspect tied in with my experience of having become a carer for a parent with dementia.

There's more I could write about that but, to keep my piece simple, I started at the point where two UK fandom subcultures first overlapped in my life. That ended up being about 900 words about the way the science fiction and comics communities were interlinked and how that was important to my memories of the comics boom of the 90's. As a bonus, I found myself listed with several comics creators I admire, including Paul B. Rainey - a Milton Keynes comics artist who took a trajectory to fame in 2023, after his dystopian domestic drama proved a hit with reviewers. 

The zine project, called 'madeleine' (a reference to Proust's madeleine memory), was a project led and designed by Simon Russell, an artist/designer posting on Mastodon and Instagram. As well as rounding up 28 writers*, Simon created a successful funding campaign on Kickstarter, which found 108 backers. With Simon in charge of the editing and design, eventually the zine project turned into a small, smart-looking book. After deducting printing and postage costs, Simon was able to donate £411.19 to Alzheimer's Research UK. 

My personal 2023 domestic drama was an experience of recovering from burnout. More about that in the next post. 

Click here for more about the Kickstarter madeleine zine project.

* Madeleine was made by Brad Brooks: Nick Bryan: Dan Butcher: Dan Charnley: Lee Christien: Ben Clark; Eamonn Clarke; David Cranna; Oliver East; Hannah Eaton; Shari Emerson; Tony Esmond; Martin Feekins; Sam Hardacre; Alan Henderson; Nic Ho Chee; Paul Hudson; ILYA; Guy Lawley; Iestyn Pettigrew; Alan Purdie; Paul B. Rainey; Suzanna Raymond; Simon Russell; Jon Sapsed; Dez Skinn; Giovanni Spinella; Myfanwy Tristram.
* The book has been edited, designed and illustrated by Simon Russell

Sketching for MK Lit Fest

Sketch of the MK Lit Fest launch event for the MinK zine.

Live Event Sketching 

In September I was very pleased to take on an assignment for our local literary festival (now in its 2nd year). The MK Lit Fest organisers had seen an artist in residence at another literary event and approached me due to seeing my own sketches of last year's MK Lit Fest event on Instagram.

Sketching at an event is a fun an interesting mix of observational drawing and listening to the speakers. There are many ways to go about this but the one I use is to sketch 'live' on location, adding notes while I work or after the talk. I also take colour notes as I like to add watercolour washes to my sketches.

Another way to work might be to use the sketches as the basis of a more finished looking piece, possibly stringing together a theme or bullet points from the presentations. At this event we went with the immediacy of the loose sketching style which I use for urban sketching. My first sketches took in the launch event, including contributors to the MinK zine, followed by the first star guest. My notes are a mixture of comments from the speakers and background information which I researched when I got home.

VG Lee reading at MK Lit Fest

Sharing on Social Media

When the pictures of my drawings went up on social media, we also tagged in the various writers and local arts organisations. My literary festival sketches seem to have gone down particularly well with the writers from the Polari Literary Salon, based in London, who were delighted to find out that they'd been sketched whilst they were on stage. Other sketchers may have gone for a more flamboyant approach and could have made sketching more of a performance piece but my style is to sit quietly in a corner and to do candid observational sketching.

The organisers told me that posts on Facebook seemed to encourage more clicks and posts on Twitter seemed to generate more discussion. Overall the experience seems to have been a great success for both myself and the organisers, so I'd consider doing this again for another event.

Live Sketching Tips

For anyone looking for tips on practising this style of reportage, I'd recommend investing in a couple of sketchbooks, some pens or brushes that you feel comfortable drawing quickly with, a portable set of pan watercolours, watercolour pencils or gouache colours. Find a comfortable place to stand or sit while you people-watch, if you perch quietly in one place then people and animals tend to feel more comfortable than if you fidget or announce your presence. If you're uncomfortable with drawing people then start practising by drawing the environment and take some life drawing classes to improve the way you draw figures.

Also look at examples of urban sketching on websites. There are local sketch groups in Bedford and Northampton if you want to embrace the social side of sketching and a Facebook group for sketchers like myself in Milton Keynes.

To see more of  my MK Lit Fest sketches, please take a look at my Instagram account @srfirehorseart.

Note: an earlier version of this article appeared on LinkedIn.

Eventful sketching

MK Lit Fest 2018

MK Lit Fest 2018 announcement

Residency

It is the second year of the new literary festival for Milton Keynes and this year the organisers have selected me to be their artist in residence. This will be a new experience for both of us, so I'm excited to see how it'll work out. I'm always happy to sketch indoors with tea and books on tap, so it should be fun.

Last year I went to MK Litfest mainly to see how the event represented diversity and I was pleasantly surprised. I ended up enjoying the talks more than I expected and took some sketch notes at the event which I shared on Instagram, tagging in the event's authors and publishers.

The organisers liked my drawings so much that they've asked me back as their artist in residence. I'm looking forward to sharing my best sketches with everyone via Facebook and Instagram. I've already shared a sketch I made at one of their 'taster' events at MK Gallery.

I'm also looking forward to seeing a print copy of 'MinK, their new 52-page literary zine, at the launch event on the 21st September. There should be an online version too for those unable to attend the festival.

This year's event runs from Friday 21st through to Monday 24th September at the Holiday Inn in central Milton Keynes. You can find out more about it here: https://www.mklitfest.org/

Location sketching

If you want to see examples of other people sketching on location I'd recommend Dutch illustrator Maaike Hartjes for a cartoon (comics) based style, Canadian journalist and war artist Richard Johnson's line drawings, artist and author James Gurney for painting on location, plus a whole raft of urban sketchers.

Maze Life

Twists and Turns in 2018

One time I attended an event in a hotel that had some amusing notices posted up by a witty attendee. These read ' YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE'. This phrase, I later learnt, has its origins in a computer game developed for the PDP-10 * about which you can read more here.

My feeling about most of the first half of 2018 is also summed up by the above phrase, which is why I haven't written any updates until now. If I wanted to get more philosophical I might reference Plato's allegory of the cave but I think that can wait until another post.

In June - July I had my first exhibition of the year, for Arts For Health Milton Keynes, with MKDAD 2018-You See Me-moving forward. In this I was happy to show a bright, bold paper collage of mine that I'd made as part of an MK Gallery workshop with the English National Ballet. You can see more about the show on my Instagram feed here.

In July I also hooked up with Avant-Gardening and Lisa Cheung, who are artists running some art-linked outdoor play events this summer, as part of the MK Festival Fringe 2018. You can read more about their events here.

Anyway, things have started to pick up again now and so my next bit of news is that I made a new page of artwork using some of my urban sketches. This was put together specially for a new Milton Keynes literary zine called MinK, which is linked to the second MK Lit Fest literary festival. My page was selected and will be included in the zine but ...

.. if you'd like to make sure there is a print version (and bag yourself some rewards) then please support the MinK zine Kickstarter campaign by 4pm on the 8th August. They're most of the way to the target and just need a few more supporters to reach the goal but there's only 3 days left!



* many years ago I programmed a PDP-11, so I know the kind of kit they refer to

Tarting About

A post shared by Suzanna Raymond | (@srfirehorseart) on Oct 13, 2016 at 9:49am PDT

T'Art Zine

The T'Art show for International Women's Day 2017 has opened at Bones & Pearl Studios, in London. It's a group exhibition celebrating International Women’s Day with participatory zine making!

Following the Sweet 'Art group on Instagram led to me spotting an opportunity to contribute to the T'Art zine that forms part of this year's event. The page I submitted is the same one that has appeared in Girl Frenzy to Crone Frenzy but it will hopefully get a new audience at this event.

The T'Art show runs 7th - 9th March, with an opening event in the evening on the 8th March. See more about what they do at http://www.wearesweetart.com/

The CAS PostIt Exchange

Following up a link I saw on Facebook, I'm pleased to say I have been selected up to take part in the Chapel Arts Studios Post It Exchange. The CAS project, based in Andover, is about putting together artists to collaborate on items they post to each other. The results will be shared on Instagram with the #CASpostitexchange tag. My Instagram name is @srfirehorseart.

The project has just launched in pilot and they're still open to including more artists. More info on the project is on their website:  http://www.chapelartsstudios.co.uk/events/event/pilot-cas-postit/

Seventy Percent Admin

As has been observed elsewhere, an artist's life is only somewhat about creating wonderful things, the bulk of it is everything else. That means working to pay the bills, filing, submitting your tax return, DBS updates, insurance, networking and so on. After all that you may be able to squeeze the creativity into the last 30% of your time.

Likewise with my own life. So I've just updated my CV and artist's statement and have applied to another MK Calling exhibition at MK Gallery, this time with some of my urban sketches. Wish me luck!