The Observer 1990 - 1992

One of the first miserable efforts. I found it demoralising. 1990.
1990
1990:
1990:
1990:
1991: (A personal favourite.)
Easter drawing 1991:
1992: My daughter was late for school that morning as I stuck her hands in a pot of red paint to assist in producing the image. I think Monday 's were the deadline. Everything left to the last moment.
February 1992:
1991:
1991:
1991: Raymond Briggs phoned me about this drawing. He asked me what paper I used as he was impressed with my sensitive handling of watercolour.
1991:
1991: Wouldn't be allowed to draw this now.
1991:
1991:
1991:
1991: Later used for a cd cover without my permission - it's reproduction on the cover was first class. Took some tracking down to get the bastards to cough up. Cannot remember the name of the band I know they were a favourite of John Peel's.(Bang Bang Machine).
1991:
1992:

I had a small exhibition with the shitty title of No Man Is An Island at the AOI gallery near Goodge Street London in the autumn of 1989. I remember Gary Powell and Jake Abrams helping me to hang the thing. At the Private View I vaguely remember Jean Christian Knaff. I remember Dave Ashmore art director at The Observer Newspaper or Telegraph with Graeme Murdoch and Steve Stafford and another art director from the Observer Magazine. This is over 20 years ago....there were bunch from Walker Books too and Brian Love. Anyway I remember thinking it was lot of work and effort for fuck all. The bloody ego of seeing your work in frames on a wall, together up to that point. So what.

Chris Meiklejohn did acquire a large original charcoal portrait drawing of Bob Dylan that had been commissioned by the Observer Newspaper earlier that year. Meiklejohn was an agent who ran a very successful commercial illustration agency, we had met by chance on holiday a couple of years earlier, we both had a regard for each other although we were opposite poles of the planet. He got in touch with me out of the blue 3 or 4 years ago just to berate me for not being as successful as Banksie...............the man has a point.

So a few weeks after the exhibition the anonymous art director from the Observer Magazine who I had met at the show phoned me and asked if I might be interested in illustrating a new medical column to run on the back page of the magazine for the first 6 weeks starting in January 1990. Graham Mitchener told me I would be the first of a rota of artists used...........and a fee of £250 per drawing as it was only going to be used at a couple of columns wide and about 2 inches high - bloody small in other words. So I said yes. For 6 weeks my miserable efforts ran in the magazine, the printing was awful mainly because the originals were so damn huge, and the reproduction was so small. It used to take me just as long to package the things up for Red Star (a British Rail courier service) as to draw the sodding stuff. I was looking forward to the end of the stint when I received a postcard with a Goya reproduction decorating it's front from the author of the pieces John Collee ( a rare thing to have feedback and contact with the writer) stating how brilliant my drawings were and that he was going to write less copy in future so allowing more space for my work. (crafty move less words same money). And subsequently Graham Mitchener phoned to say they were going to run the current drawing bigger like nearly half a page and I could continue doing the page for as long as it lasted and do whatever I wanted. Still £250 quid though. So I said ok. I can't ever remember faxing them roughs. I would get the faxed copy and react to the text. In nearly three years I think I had only one negative response from Graham about a drawing and he still ran it. One drawing made the letters page of the paper forcing an apology from the editor of the paper, and I have to confess it was a misjudged drawing although graphically sound. I would get a sack full of mail(well for an illustrator) over the 2-3 years I illustrated the column suggesting I must be on drugs or alcohol to produce such juvenile immature and disgusting images that would be more at home in The Sun or the waste bin.It was just the adrenaline rush of a deadline and Collee's slant that drove me and the fact that the art director had total confidence in me. Excavating some of these sample from the garage is depressing and there was a lot of mediocre guff produced I would estimate for every four drawings done there might be a decent one.

It was while I was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1992 that I got told that the fax that I had just received for the next illustration was to be my last drawing for The Observer. Sorry.

It was a great frantic period. Shame I've never really moved on I've been stuck in the same trough ever since.