Arf! Festival (Part 1)

We just returned from the amazing ARF festival in Rome, where I had an exhibition of original comic art, put together by Stefano Piccoli and the ARF team. It was a fantastic weekend at a busy and inspiring festival, (situated in the fascinating ex-abbatoir turned Arts centre; Mattatoio) and I couldn’t have been happier with how Stefano had put together the exhibition.

Despite my new book Hors Scène being the focus of the exhibit, Stefano had also asked for originals from all 4 of my previous books, so I dug deep down into storage boxes to pull out sketches and originals from the last 15 years. It was a great opportunity to revisit old work and to see originals displayed together, so I will talk through some pieces on here. Starting back in 2008 (wobbly fade)…

BIRCHFIELD CLOSE: Before I had anything published, I worked on very small comics that I would print and assemble myself into little booklets (for showing at exhibitions and artist book fairs). I worked as a technician at the time in the litho room at UWE Bristol, so in evenings and weekends I could expose my originals (painted in rotring ink onto mark-resist printing film) onto litho plates, and would print them on the offset proofing press.

This was my most ambitious attempt at a publication from that period (printed over the summer holidays when us technicians had the rooms to ourselves), 16 pages of comics printed in 3 colours on a single double sided sheet, with a 2 colour card cover.

Lots of people who saw the exhibition couldn’t believe how small the mark-making is, and to be honest looking back at them, I can barely believe it too! I was working exactly to scale as the ink drawings were exposed directly onto litho plates (with no scanning or digital part of the process giving me options to scale anything down).

Shortly after making that book I expanded into a longer story, and ended up publishing it with Nobrow as Birchfield close, 2010 (Unfortunately long out of print, but still in print with Dargaud in France as DIMANCHE.) For the published versions of these (and my other books) I created the art in the same way as before, but scanned into photoshop to prepare layers for spot-colour litho printing ( rather than printing myself on the proofing press).

PEBBLE ISLAND: With the same process and at around the same time, I was also making small comics which became Pebble Island 2010, with similarly tiny dots and patterns on layers of film.

DOCKWOOD / AUTOMNE: The art for this book was made in the same way as above (on layers of film), but for the exhibition I displayed a set of screen prints that I created of these pages.

KINGDOM: Set on a summer holiday in the coast of Britain, I wanted Kingdom to be bigger and more detailed than anything I had done before. With the originals for this book, I still drew on layers of film, but switched to Polydraw drafting film, a smoother and nicer surface (commonly used by architects before moving to digital).

Unfortunately the English-language edition of Kingdom didn’t last long in print, but it is still available in french with Dargaud, (and I hope to get it back into print again in the English language one day).

That seems to be all that I have room for on this post, so I will follow up with my Hors Scène artworks in the next post. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments about any of these.

Thanks again to Stefano and everyone at Arf! More soon.