the sprawling oeuvre

Although it is easy to dismiss the casual scribblings, anarchic doodlings and apparently random notes that go into a sketchpad as useless drivel, time normally reveals an order to the thoughts that wasn’t apparent when they were made. Over years the half-formed things that have gone into a sketchpad reveal themselves to be a much truer chronicle of events than the polished works that got extricated from it and developed into ‘works.’ So looking back, retrospectively, on many years’ worth of sketchpads, it becomes instantly clear that Monkl features heavily in the more recent books with his own adventures often running curiously parallel to my own; and that I tend to go to museums and draw the stuffed beasts when I am feeling distressed.

Thus having self-indulgently (whatthehell) sat down with two bottles of stout, my pile of old sketchpads and the pillaged broadband, I present to you now some selected works from the oeuvre of sketchpads that now resides on my bookshelf. A mini-retrospective of old notes, if you will. I am getting lots of ideas from these for Love is Awesome.

Monkl is cold and wet.

Bed will make everything OK again. (Monkl is a surprising fount of common sense.)

…but even he sometimes gets confused.

What’s the matter Felix? I don’t know. I don’t like it when you’re sad. Let’s cuddle.
Again with the simple emotions; so good.

There appear to be some designs for knitted/felted cakes, featuring design instructions.

and the Heart, of course. Here in anatomical state;

Here in rather more dramatic status, including the defiant phrase ‘the only way forward is through.’

Trumping that neatly however, is Sarah Lucas’ Lion heart series, drawn here at an exhibition I went to in Dublin. Lucas made 50 editions of a bronze cast of an actual lion’s heart. She wins I think, in the extra, extra, extra tripleplusgiant LOVE IS AWESOME Art Statement stakes. How cool would it be to be able to say ‘no, I can’t come out on Friday night because I am casting 50 Lion Hearts in bronze.’ It beats the old ‘washing the hair’ excuse, and scares off unserious prospective partners/timewasters.

But there is always the potential for, say, 100 solid iron Tiger Hearts, no?

And we can’t have lions and tigers without bears. So to finish the collection, here’s one I drew in the Dublin Natural History Museum in another lifetime when I lived in Ireland.

Maybe I need to schedule a visit somewhere where I can draw animals? Perhaps a place with living meerkats? Perhaps The Dream of Felix ought to be entirely chronicled via meerkat cartoons.

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