THE INDEPENDENT LINE – a one day Symposium at Pittville Studios,

University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham on Wednesday the 15 October 2008,

coinciding with the presentation ceremony of the second Cheltenham Illustration Awards.

What are the Questions?
Many answers emerged.
Don’t fear the inhibitors of your work,
Hundreds of encouragers stand behind you and glower at them.

The inhibitors fears your energy,
your fleetness of foot, and
your capacity to be in two/eighty places at the same time.

The Narrative Introduced

Integrity and truth to yourself and the generation of your stories, even when fabricating (double edged word this - making and deceiving?)
The fluidity of protest-
by the time you are discovered you have changed your trousers/sex/manifesto.
Graphic design/illustration/photography/animator/writer/ sound maker
moving surely from room to room without the need to justify or apologise
These are the New Possibilities.

Autobiography,

the story lies in you
Characterisation based on those at hand
The patois and clothing of the nearest person
Each character their own marvel
Kid’s projects – Benoit Jacques ('Bonjour, Mon Petit' ) and Le Debut.
Perhaps it was all so easy when you were little?
Are you better now?
Remember being a kid?

Ethos –

what are the four crucial points that are what you hold and will keep to?
When does your Ethos get to be a Manifesto?
(…when you hit someone on the head with it?)

Identity – Alone and/or in Collaboration

Establish for yourself the balance of the individual in the whole.
Find a name for your imprint and just do it ……..
The Press that is you -  as big as the  ATLANTIC

Steve Braund and the Atlantic Press

When they have your product in their hands,
how do your readers know that you are not
A Cultural Colossus?
You may in fact be in occupation of a file cabinet or
Seated behind a screen like The Wizard of Oz?

Who are you when you do this?  
There is the chance for a concealed identity,
a false identity.
Invent a committee that is you.
It might delay or accelerate decisions
but actually conceal your individual whims.

Groups of artists form and reform,
flux of titles of the groups, 
a collaborative entity (thought by all to be permanent)
then becomes a rebus or palindrome
or even trickles down the drain.

The role of the educational institution?
Is it making space for your identity or curtailing it?
What happens to the Departments when the room dividers are wheeled away?

The USP (unique Selling Proposition)

Inventing a product – an issue – a proposition  –
LEMORETTE CIGARETTES,
The tobacco company with its own mirage Museum
and its invented Factory.

Working Process and accretion of materials

Develop the drive to store, to research and to develop.
Drawing, seizing images and amassing your own accretion.
Camera phones at the ready for the inadvertent

Damian Gascoigne at Kingston University

(heads appear in folds, birds from spillage, sly looks from bins)
There is bureaucracy and bureaucracy.
(The Fastidious and the Perverse can exist in the one concertina file)
Books to be held in the hand but also to be projected on to walls in galleries.

Sketchbooks and the Alliance Graphique (Saul Bass).
Regular automatic actions – regular systematic practice that is yours.
Systems without guile and sometimes without conscious thought.
The idea in the drawn doodle (on the phone) .
Doodle in drawing, doodle become a tin relief, and held in its wooden portfolio.
Mischief has many incarnations.
Keep your audience on the hop.
They can pay you and be grateful.

Content content content

What have you to say? Yes, YOU.
Is it all surface? It can’t be.
Substance and style.
Issues and persuasion.
Telling tiny tales and giant ones
Maybe at the same time.
What is the role of the deliberate?
What is the role of the random?
There is Infinite production -  Batch production –

to the Single Unit that could pretend to be Legion.

The Narrative

Once much attacked as uncool- as unconnected with matters of style and gesture.
Now we all need a Narrative (Gordon Brown?).
Natural story telling – we all do it but don’t sufficiently cherish its visual manifestations.
Freedom of directions of the sequential flow - side to side - down and up –
In front of you and behind.
Sketchbooks don’t always run from front to back.
Think about the power of the Narratives you saw as a child.

The Band Dessiné and Paul Gravett, Talk, "Discovering Manga" October 23trd 2006.

These You have Loved

• BLAST (1914-1915) the puce monster (BLASTING to the right/BLESSING to the left)
• Edward Gorey - foreground and background narratives, in parallel or diverging.
• Antonio Petruccelli “Toby…..fame at last”
• Paul Slater at Falmouth.
• George Herriman and Krazy Kat.
• Winsor McKay and the Rarebit Fiend.
• Rudolf Toppfer and drawings with text for his students.

The history of the medium reveals to you people like you.
Bless them.

Production Values

The simple, folded sheet book.
From side one to side eight and folded up to be a book of sorts
….. all sorted.

Costing the product - How to charge, and to establish value.
Pull the market, albeit artificial, around you like a grass skirt.

Books sent back and forth like a card game with your readers.
Your very own Book Exchange.
What is a free gift, what is a penalty that could correspond?
Could you conduct a feud down line with books?

Multimedia elements now abound, setting the static with the kinetic.
We see the dissolving of the boundaries  as never before,
enabling you to swerve round impediments and jobsworth attitudes.
(Cautious voice here…”where does this leave the academic course, pray?”?

The range of publishing options from high production values
(the Artist’s Book)
through the book made by the artist,
to the discardable, reversible, contemptible, canard, feuilleton, squib.

Damp Flat and Jackie Batey

The tools of the trade – staplers, cutters, ad hoc-ism and assembly of the units
Surfaces of paper, fibre, leaf and unlikely detritus

Design and the Printed Page

The role of lettering and the caption - speech bubbles and noise implied.
The speech bubble that contains  conflicting texts,
(found texts)…
(nominal texts)…
The possibilities of the monumental compressed in the miniature.
Graphic equivalents of turns of phrase,
types of voice, rhetoric, wheedling and cacophony,
Stretching out the tensions between meaning and appearance.

Distribution

The phenomenon of the internet available within feet of everybody.
Be a swimmer going upstream and down (the salmon and reverse)
Self promotion, (identity need not be fixed)
Establish your own web identity NOW, fast and cheap.
International contacts, press the button and you are
in attendance in a library in Alaska,
a bedroom in Singapore,
a backyard in Dorking.

Above all

And circling the proceedings there is
The awareness of a new age of freedom
And a speed a directness to get what you want to say, want to show, want to deny
Taken out to a receptive world.

 

The Fire Alarm clears the building… the Symposium clears the Mind.

Chris Mullen The Visual Telling of Stories .....................16 October 2008

dedicated with love from everybody to Brian Love.