Day 1 of my residency was a flop and doesn’t warrant its own post so I’ve decided my residency actually starts today, Tuesday. On Monday I missed my train in an attempt to track down a lightbox I lost in Ilford the previous evening, with no success. I arrived in Birmingham a few hours later than intended and spent the afternoon chilling in Birmingham, coming to terms with my loss and reflecting on how I always had a bad feeling about Ilford.
Day two has been very good. I realised my hotel accommodation has two ‘naturally occurring’ lightboxes so no more dwelling on the past. I spent the morning organising my desktop, reducing the dense constellation of docs sprawled over my screen into a few accurately labelled folders. I found a quiet spot at the Library of Birmingham to work in and worked through my ‘to do’ list. I spent time reading a few pieces of text I intended to illustrate and gathered reference imagery from the internet which I could work from later. After lunch I returned for some serious ‘away from keyboard’ time. I found the art section and was very excited to see there was a large collection of art and design books with lots of very old titles. I’ve found it difficult in London to find a non-bureaucratic library which has a good collection of art and design books, I need to make more of an effort to do this when I get back. The afternoon was spent going through books about printing, drawing, collage and anything else I liked the sound/look of. My favourite was an old book about drawing, it made me want to draw more.
I headed to Cass Art to buy some supplies and then to a coffee shop to meet Charlotte Bailey, illustrator and organiser of Birmingham’s Laydeez do Comics. I had asked her to bring some of her work if possible which she did. We chatted for a while and she gave me a zine she made about Janelle Monae which she had printed at Rope Press, looking forward to reading it. She also showed me her sketchbook with some ink drawings she had been working on. Her drawings are so nice and I was seeing them with a new freshness having gone through so many drawing books in the library, being more attentive to detail and picking up on the different types of strokes she used. I admired how instinctually she worked.
