Woodcuts, drawings, and the illustrated man…

Waking up as a woodcut was just fine, almost expected really what with all the woods I’d not been able to see for the bloody trees recently.

It was the goldfish that bothered me. Just how the hell had a goldfish got into my mouth whilst I was sleeping and where the bloody hell was my tongue? And isn’t that a koala next to that damned fish?

How Kafkaesque. You go to bed as one thing and wake up as another.

I guess when you live in a comic book world becoming an illustration is inevitable.

I’ve always been full of pictures, choc full, all wanting to be out and abroad – cats and dogs and houses and birds and monsters and clouds and the sea. Sometimes my fingers fly in the haste to let them out they shout so much. I call them doodles, but they are really thoughts, thoughts made real on paper, canvas, glass, sand, cardboard, old receipts, and junk mail.

I’ve been drawing all my life. I probably started in the womb, tracing patterns with my half formed fingers on my mother’s flesh. Sometimes I wonder if my marks remain like ancient cave drawings in the dark. I even have a full body tattoo. It's just hard to see because it is under my skin, etched there by my life.

We all start out as artists until one by one drop by the wayside as we convince ourselves the marks we make on paper aren’t the right ones and suddenly we can draw no longer.

Ask a room full of children to draw a house and they will, bold and brash and colourful, paying no attention to the reality of a house at all. Their houses come from their minds not from their eyes, they don’t care if the house they draw doesn’t look like a house. Why would they?

What pictures I have inside me - the illustrated man.

What pictures you have inside you.

Draw them.