'After Smith': The Intercorstal In Bremen

Regular readers will be aware that recently I travelled out to Bremen (which is in Germany) to hang and present 'After Smith', a set of Intercorstal pages all based on comics written by John Smith for 2000AD. It's just over a week since opening night, and with that in mind I wanted to relate, like some kind of society diarist, the ins-and-outs of everything that happened.

The reality is, I doubt you'll want to sit through 3,000 words of me saying how much fun I had, so I'll stick to bulletpoints, and if you get bored halfway through you can skip to the next one! It's the internet age, and I live by TLDR, and I'd understand if you do too.

Projektraum 404 from the outside

• Bremen is LOVELY. I mean, it could just because I was seeing it through the filter of Gregor (the owner/curator of Projektraum 404) and his group of friends. But I had a great time. A lot of it was spent wondering the streets with my fellow exhibitor Florian, who I embarrased a fair amount by taking pictures of geographical and social features. There're bikes everywhere, and once I'd learned that I was standing on their bit of the pavement all the cyclists stopped being rude to me. Seriously, if you have a free weekend, I'd suggest spending it in Bremen. It's aces. I hope to go back soonish.
• Opening night on the 11th was really fun. (I almost said it 'was a blast' but I don't really feel comfortable with that yet, I just don't think I'm the sort of person who 'has a blast' anywhere). I reckon about 40-50 people turned up. I'd prepared a book of the original 2000AD pages I'd worked from for After Smith and was forever coercing people into using it to compare my pages against. I also scared a few non-English speakers with over-excited 'youawrights' ("You all right?" but condensed) , which I use as a form of greeting but clearly sounded like nonsense to German ears.

  

  'After Smith' on a wall.

• Florian and I were scheduled to give an artist talk on the 13th, which I think we were both quietly dreading. After kind of sorting out a projector, and making sure our selected images looked OK-ish, we quietly waited for everyone who'd said they'd come to materialise... 2 people did. So, in one respect, it was an abject failure. In another though, I had a great time ('having a great time' was pretty much par for the course, mind you). I got to wang on about comics to my heart's desire, and the food served by Kulturkueche was mindblowing. 
• I've mentioned Florian - he's a French artist, who lives in Brussels. He's currently working on a 16-chapter comic, which is loosely about time travel, and includes a man becoming a new dimension when his time machine goes wrong. It's FANTASTIC (and also in French) and you should at least do yourself a favour by going to his website. For Abstrakte Comics 2, he'd also made a gigantic 'empty' comic which enriched everyone's lives.

  

  Florian's 'empty comic'. Probably the half-way pint between sculpture and comics?

• The gallery, Projektraum 404 was in many ways my home for the weekend. It's based on the first floor of a house owned by a lovely couple called Jan and Julia and run by Gregor Straube, who I've mentioned. It's ambitious, fearless and also has a jam-packed calendar thanks to Gregor's work. I can't thank everyone involved enough for inviting me out and putting me up, and also putting up with me.
  
• On the subject of 'putting up with me'. If there's one thing I've learned about myself from my trip is that if I'm allowed to talk unchecked, I'll usually end up eulogising about comics. Gregor and Florian both learned the magic phrase 'You're doing that thing again' but not everyone who turned up on opening night had that luxury, and I wanged on about 2000AD and John Smith to an extent that might be surprising... except from someone who'd just spent three months putting together an exhibition based on how much I love 2000AD and John Smith.
• I also put up 24 pages from Intercorstal 2 which went across really well. People were able to take each page on its own merits, and people looking at them didn't constantly have me directing them to 'the book of originals'. I'm increasingly excited about '683', which is the natural step-up from Intercorstal 2, and is so far more cohesive.

  

  Intercorstal 2 up on a wall

I'll leave it there, now. If you're still here, and don't know what 'After Smith' is, you should go HERE or better yet just download the free PDF, with an introduction to my madness courtesy of Tom Whiteley.

Page 9 from 'After Smith' based on a page from 'Killing Time' originally by John Smith and Chris Weston.

Announcing - The Intercorstal: After Smith

On the left: Winwood and Cord in Killing Time (An Indigo Prime story) Part 5 Page 1. Art by Chris Weston, written by John Smith, Letters by Tom Frame
On the right: Prep page done for my reinterpretation.

"The Intercorstal: After Smith" is a series of artworks reinterpreting comic pages written by John Smith. It will be exhibited at Projectroom 404 in Bremen from 11th September - 4th October 2015.

A few months ago I was approached by Gregor Straub of Projectroom 404 in Bremen to participate in a series of exhibitions running this year that cover the Abstract Comics movement. Obviously, I agreed, and then set about worrying about what I'd exhibit.

With time to worry, I continued work on The Intercorstal 2, which naturally ended and turned into The Intercorstal 683 (which I'm still being a little coy about sharing). The last page of The Intercorstal 2 was a reinterpretation of a page from Revere, which ran in 2000AD in the 90s, and is one of my favourite comics of all time. On posting it, Tom Whiteley, who blogs at the superlative Suggested For Mature Readers, mentioned on Twitter how good it would be to reinterpret Revere in its entirety. I think he was only half-joking.

That thought merged over time with my thoughts of continuing the After Wainwright series that I started for the Lakes Comic Art Festival and then coalesced into paying tribute to one of the writers that has the most effect on my life - John Smith.

It's impossible to quantify the effect Smith's writing has had on me, both as an artist and person. I very much doubt The Intercorstal would have existed had it not been for his influence, although I hadn't actually realised when I started it. I joked recently that my entire 'swirly line style' is a subconcious attempt to recreate Winwood's hair as it appeared in Killing Time, which is probably more true than I'd like to admit.

So, 'After Smith'. I've selected 10 pages from his work for 2000AD based solely on how much I liked it and how much the series it appeared in had an effect on me. The selection also covers a number of my favourite artists, including Chris Weston, Sean Phillips, Edmund Bagwell, and Simon Harrison.

As prep, and so that I can be sure the whole idea's not going to fall apart, I've completed two half-size pages which I've included here, alongside the original pages I've worked from.

As the project continues, I'll be adding WIP images to Twitter (where I'm @grthink) and hopefully adding updates here where I'll try and go into more detail about why I've chosen particular pages/series and why I like them so much.

If you're around in Bremen during September, I hope you'll take a look.

Splundig Vur Thrigg.

On the left: Still Life Page 7. Art by Sean Phillips, written by John Smith,
On the right: Prep page done for my reinterpretation.

2000AD® JUDGE DREDD® AND ALL OTHER CHARACTERS ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS, © REBELLION A/S, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Secret 7" 2015

My sleeve for The Chemical Brothers' 'Let Forever Be' which depicts a researcher investigating a Buddhist statue that had a mummified monk inside it.

Here are the four designs I submitted to this year's Secret7". I was absolutely thrilled to get a design through again, for The Chemical Brothers' Let Forever Be, and even more thrilled to see it sell on the day (and to have gone to a great home, by the looks of it).

It's a great charity, and consistently does exemplary work for their chosen charity. It's fantistic to see them grow every year, and I'm honoured that I've been able to be a small part of that journey for the third year running. Year-on-year, my work for Secret 7's gets better, and I'm really looking forward to taking part next year.

A picture of my friend Kate Dowling's dog Bella, done for Underworld's Born Slippy. The song was named after a greyhound, a fact which a huge number of contributors seem to have picked up on.

For St Vincent's 'Digital Witness' I drew a secretary bird and added a background based on  a predominant colour in the video to the song. Like with greyhounds and Born Slippy, I get the impression that a whole slew of contributors used the same colour. Also, no idea why I drew a secretary bird -- it just felt right, and looked good.

I found out that 'Maccabee' is Hebrew for 'hammer'. So for The Maccabee's 'Go' I drew a horrendous visual pun based on the band's name.

The Intercorstal at Heads Up, ft BATMAN

38 Pages From The Intercorstal and a Batman

I was contacted a couple of months ago by Holly from Chelmsford's Shiny Shed collective, asking if I'd be interested in taking part in a group show in Chelmsford, and I leapt at the chance. Sensing the opportunity to do somethnig a little different and push the boat out a bit, as well as having by a strange set of coincidences the space and materials required, I set about creating a wearable Batman suit out of cardboard.

I went through a bit of a 'process' with this -- I knew what I needed it to look like, but I had no idea how it would work, and while I was making it was constantly worrying that what I was making wasn't artistically valid and what have you. But filling the inside of the cape with cut-up Intercorstal panels and adding panels to the white areas on the gauntlets (which was my wife's idea, to be fair) resolved that conflict.

I could wang on about my process and what this means to me, and how it ties into The Intercorstal for ages, but I'll save that for another time. For now, I'd just like to share these photos of the work I have on show, which I'm incredibly proud of -- the photos were taken while the rest of the exhibition was still being set up, so there's still tools and coffee cups and whatnot in frame. I've added some comments on each picture, which hopefully shed some light on what's going on in my head.

Any comments, questions or crticism are heartily welcomed.

And if you're able, head down to the Heads Up show -- it's on in Chelmsford in the old Barcalys Building, at the top of the High Street, running between 19th and 27th May. All the work there is incredible, and it is a genuine honour to have been asked to participate.


Batman installed, waiting for the other pieces to be wall mounted. The fists are hanging by string attached to the cape -- I only managed to work out how to do that on the day of installation. I'd encourage anyone gonig to have a go on the fists -- they can be 'worn' by holding a handle attached on the inside of the box.



The left-hand part of the installation. I jumped at the chance to use this corner of the exhibition space. It's very busy with pipes and air-con ducts and plugs, as well as the boarded-up doorway. I think it really adds texture to the presentation of the pages which I was worried would look a little flat from a distance -- especially for the bigger frames. Close up, the detail in each page is obvious, and any texture takes care of itself.



The right-hand side of the installation. The drawback of using this section of the room was that the walls are in sections -- some is solid brick, some is plasterboard, some are hollow... Mounting these was a bit of a brainache.

3 of the pages from 'Witches' in yellow-green frames. I've always considered 'Witches' to be one of the high points of The Intercorstal so far, and I think these three pages look great together.

This frame used to have 'Mist Of Blood And Rage', which I did for Operation Concrete, in it. It took hours to get those pages in, and to look as neat as they do (which I appreciate is ot as neat as they could be...). The frame's hanging on a crossbar attached to the doorframe, with the rest of the door being filled in by a single sheet of wood. I didn't want to get too over-enthusiastic and lose my cool, but thematically that's absolutely perfect for The Intercorstal - the idea of a 'hollow door', the fact that it's a doorway and not a doorway at the same time...

I've had this green frame haning up at my mum's house for years, with older work in it. I went round on the morning of the exhibition's setup to nick it back, because I realised that I needed another coloured frame to balance out the compostion of the displayed work. Because it's a light frame, I could hang it against those pipes instead of against the wall, which again adds a certain amount of texture to the setup.

Another eight pages. When arranging the pages in the frames, I didn't actually spend a lot of time considering which ones I wanted, or where. It's kind of been a theme throughout, letting the pages fall wherever they might -- for instance, when putting together the run of the first Intercorstal comic, I shuffled the pages and turned some of them back to front to randomise the order of pages through the book.

This is one of the latest pages, which have been done on A4 Bristol Board, whereas the earlier pages were done on slightly rougher A5 paper. I wanted to show all of the newer ones, but didn't have the frames I needed, so only this one went up.

Here's one of the fists, post-completion, on my living room floor. The insides of these boxes have a handle inside, set so that the fist can be worn. The handle's set in a position which feels comfortable to the wearer -- if you've got the left-hand fist on your right hand, the weighting feels wrong.

Batman Ghosts





I'm taking part in the very exciting HEADS UP group show in Chelmsford, organised by The Shiny Shed Collective, which takes place between 19th and 27th May. I'll be using the space I have as an excuse to show off The Intercorstal in a gallery context, as opposed to the short comics and zines which have been done so far. I'll also be unveiling my first 3D piece, which is a kind of semi-installation, which I'll go into more detail when the show starts.

Batman and Robin Ghosts

On sale there will be a collection of postcards of Batman Ghosts. Essentially, they're the Ghosts that I've been including in my work for years now, but with Batman's ears built in. In some of the scenes, I play up to the Batman side, in others I don't. No two are the same and I hope to have at least 50 done by the launch of the show. I've given up on the idea that I'll have scanned them all beforehand, so here's some photos of a few of them.

Vampire Batman Ghost

Unicorn Batman Ghost

Lots of Batman Ghosts

Twitter Art Exhibit 2012

Here's my submission to the 2nd Twitter Art Exhibition, being held in Moss, Norway, in April 2012. It's being organised by David Sandum, with all money from sales of artwork going to The Women's Crisis Center in Moss. Full details of the submission and event can be found HERE: http://davidsandumart.posterous.com/call-for-artists-2nd-twitter-art-exhibit-in-m

There wasn't any particular theme, but I thought it'd be cool to work on some advice that Bryan Lee O'Malley (creator of Scott Pilgrim) posted on his twitter feed:

I'm past knowing whether I followed that advice or not, but I was thinking about it while I worked on the page. Once I've had a chance to think about it a bit I might be able to make some sense of it in the context of my other comics work. As it stands, though, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and regular readers of this blog will know how terrifyingly rare it is for that to happen.



#A1Alan, finished!

*UPDATE* 13th August -- Me and my wife Amy went to see Stuart at Man About Town this afternoon because I'd forgotten to add a signature to the picture, and when we got there it was hanging in the doorway... so chuffed with myself, and so grateful to Stuart, Jordanna and everyone at Man About Town.

So, I finished the big picture of Alan Moore in plenty of time, and have dropped it off to Stuart at Man About Town for him to take to V Festival and display at his pop-up barbers. There's not much to talk about in regards to it, so here's 12 of the many pictures I took as I went. They should be in order, to show what happened when.

Process and Frustration: comXchange/Liminal final piece

This is a blog detailing the effort and process that went into preparing for a show which I missed out on because of forces outside of my control.

A little while ago I was approached by Ibrahim Ineke, an artist/curator based in the Netherlands, to participate in a show he was putting on, in conjunction with Altered Esthetics in Minneapolis. I'd previously been in contact with Ibrahim after he requested a copy of the first Intercorstal comic I put together.

The show was to be a collaborative one between 5 US comic artists and 5 European artists. The idea was that each artist would send a comic of theirs across the Atlantic. They would then choose a sequence, or pair, of panels from the comic that they received and create a large-scale artwork based on the gap, or gaps, between those panels. As The Intercorstal is based in 'the space between spaces' I was really enthusiastic about getting started.

For the project, I put together The Intercorstal: Collider and sent it off. In return, I got a comic back which had detailed plans on how to build a High Tunnel by Maxeem Konrardy as part of a community project. It was the exact opposite of my comic, and therefore extremely exciting to work on, as well as extremely difficult. After a lot of deliberating, I chose two very specific panels to work inbetween, which showed how to fix two planks of wood together end-on-end using a bridging block of wood. The idea was to find the half-way point as the block was put in place and then do some Intercorstal-ly swirls and patterns around it. This quickly went wrong, as I was going to leave any 'physical' objects (i.e. the wood) as empty space, and within 20mins of drawing I'd accidentally filled in that space.

So, I reviewed what I had, and the idea, and went in a slightly different direction, and instead split the image I had into two, to better enforce the idea of the space between the planks and the block, and the action taking place between them. At first, I was gonig to build up the seperated objects onto one final image, but couldn't decide on how they best went together, so in the end they were left seperate. Below are three images -- two showing me trying to decide on a single image, the third shwoing what I finished with.




Overjoyed at having finished, with a week to go I packed the whole thing up and sent it recorded delivery to Ibrahim. And it never turned up. The show started, and Ibrahim emailed me to say how sorry he was not to have been able to include my work. A few days before the end of the show, he found out that it had been delivered, the day after the show started, but that he was out and his neighbour had taken receipt of the parcel, and not told him for two weeks.

Ibrahim still has the art, and the stack of Collider comics that I sent along with it, and I've left them with him, because I've not got the room for them really, and with first hand knowledge of how much it cost to post, wouldn't want to put him out by spending the money on sending it back. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat, because I think we're on a similar page, creative-wise, and he's a true gent to boot.

And that's that. Lesson learened, if there is a lesson to be learned.

Edit: LATER THIS SAME DAY: Writing this blog has been very cathartic, and made me realise that although I'm still angry about these circumstances, there's only two things I'd do differently: 1) Paint the artwork, because I left it as white paper with black marker, and I think painting it would have lifted the final piece 2) Fork out the extra for full-on postage. I went for First Class Signed-For, whereas if I'd spent £5 more it'd have been special delivery and the sad ending would have been avoided.

Here's Altered Esthetics blog on their side of the show: http://blog.alteredesthetics.org/?p=477

Britney Sabo was the artist who worked on Collider for Altered Esthetics. Here's a link to her website, and below is a shaky cameraphone photo of her finished piece, which despite the quality of the photo, I think looks aces.

Cut-Click Mailart Exhibition, Cleethorpes

Just a quick post to say that I've done another envelope portrait for the travelling Cut-Click mailart exhibition (I talk about the first one HERE). The exhibiton will be up at Artlandinsh in Cleethorpes -- details are in the poster above.

The portrait this time is of Patrick R Donahoe, the current US Postmaster General. Whereas the subject of my earlier envelope portrait was John Stonehouse, who'd led a fascinating life featuring double-identities and faked deaths, which I built into the image, Mr Donahoe seems very boring. The biggest story around him is that he's inherited the US Postal Service at its weakest, poorest state, so I made an effort to include that. Here's the image:

Intercorstal On Show

It feels like a long time ago now, but on December 7th 2010 (it's the 20th as I write this) I got a chance to show off some of the work I've done on The Intercorstal in a new way -- rather than in a comic, it was hanging on banners.

It came about because my new department at work held a gig/DJ night for... well, nobody's really sure how it came about. But somehow it was decided that a gig/DJ night would be put on, and they arranged The Distillers bar to hold it in. And then the ringleader of effort said 'Gareth, you can display some of your art on the windows, it'll look good!' despite not really knowing what I've been working on.

Through a desperate creativve process which involved... again, I can't really remember how I got to where I did. But I decided that I'd hang pages from The Intercorstal on banners from the balconies in the pub. I won't go into the full banner-making process but at 5pm on the day, with doors open at 7pm, I started frantically combining lining paper, blown up Intercorstal pages and plastic dowling rods with staples. The plan was to make eight banners, which after an hour and a half was reduced to six, and after another half an hour reduced to four. At about 7-ish, with me very hot and bothered, receiving desperate looks from the head waitress because I was spread out across some of her dining area, myself and a colleague managed to get the banners hung.

Feedback on the night was surprisingly positive, although limited as barely anyone turned up...and everything was packed up at 9:30, so it took longer to set the display up than it was on show for. The bar staff were kind enough to take the banners off my hands at the end of the night, but that might be because the evening's compere told the assembled crowd that my work sold for great amounts of money (my work doesn't sell, let alone for a lot of money).

Having said that, I'm proud of what I managed to acheive with such limited resources -- total setup costs were £5 -- and know that if given the opportunity again, that I could replicate it. Apologies for the quality of the images, it was dark and I only had my phone on me.