PUMPKIN SQUAT

 Back to my 2011 pumpkin adventures. A smooth and regular Doric column is perfectly, but when it morphs into a pumpkin it should be coarse and lumpy with some random shape variations.

This remains one of the major challenges with a program like Revit. How to represent wonky walls and irregular elements like thatched roofs? Materials can take you part of the way and judicious use of distorted geometry in family editor can sometimes hint at organic form.

Please don't suggest AI. Something deep inside objects to using algorithms to simulate the beauty of hand crafted work. It needs the human touch. That's the whole point.

                                   

 

In 1981 and recently turned 30, I received a letter out of the blue. One of my old college tutors thought I might be interested in a volunteering opportunity in newly independent Zimbabwe.

For the past 8 years I had been working in the building trades at a very basic hands-on level, including a 6 month training programme as a bricklayer. Did I want to join an experimental school, training kids from refugee camps to build there own school.

It was exciting and scary in equal measure. As preparation I was sent to an "Intermediate Technology Workshop" in the midlands for a couple of days. That was a lot of fun.

These are some of the sketches I made in the days following the workshop. My attempt to internalise what I had learnt. Wedging clay and moulding hand-made bricks.

I love digital tools and the benefits of automation, but there is also something magical about the old ways of working. I do hope that my grandsons' generation will find ways to keep both traditions alive. A word of plenty where people experience the joy of making beautiful buildings with their bare hands.

In 1980 two friends from my student days invited me to join their project, self-publishing a book about the "squatting movement". Nick was the editor, Caroline the designer and I became illustrator.

This is a sheet of typographic elements, drawn with Rotring pen on tracing paper, photographically reproduced and pasted up by hand, by Caroline on the page layouts.

Most of these are conceived as borders and division strips. A few years later we would have done this digitally, but it was a great privilege to experience the old-school approach in its dying moments.

"Squatting, the Real Story" As illustrator I was responsible for the section pages of this 1980 book. Caroline and Nick gave me a concept which I had to flesh out.

In this case my challenge was to create a series of cartoons, drawn in different styles, as if by several artists. Some were reinterpretations of published drawings from pamphlets and community papers. Some were new concepts devised for the book.

The policemen joke is an archive image from 1946. All the section pages featured a pale grey background. Done with an adhesive film called Letratone.

A second sheet of "squatting jokes" from 1980. Towards the end of my time in England. I had been doing hands-on building work in Sheffield throughout my twenties and was now casting about for my next adventure.

I tried very hard to vary my graphic style from joke to joke. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to become a full-time graphic artist and illustrator. But instead it was my fate to switch focus repeatedly. No regrets.

The overarching theme here is "history" The idea that "the common people" have struggled against the power of landlords from time immemorial. A little naive perhaps, but we were young and it was all done with a cheeky grin and a sense of mischief.

  

         


Not quite sure how this happened... A bit of digital cheating but still kind of impromptu. Chuck was always a huge inspiration. Saw him twice, once in London around 1972 and a few years later in Sheffield with my old mate and bricklaying partner John Hobson.