I’m starting to get to the kind of standard I want to be working at, and I’m thinking through whether I want to do these digitally or really stretch myself and work with paint, which would be enormously satisfying if I manage to pull it off! I’ve got my first mentoring session tomorrow, so hopefully that’ll help me get a bit closer to an answer on that front. In the meantime, here’s a sheep I spent most of last week working on. I keep on returning to the idea of art gallery as a space of worship, one of the few spaces where we stop and reflect on mysteries greater than ourselves and I think that’s something that I’m going to try to explore more fully through the residency now that I have the chance to make that kind of devotion.

Being the kind of obstinate person I am, while UKIP have been popping up all over the place with their wonderful brand of national socialism, it just makes me want to stick my colours very firmly to the mast and I’ve been looking through a lot of the entarte kunst artists whose work was displayed as examples of how art had fallen into degeneracy. That led me on to revisit the Constructivist art that formed the Royal Academy’s Building the Revolution exhibition. It’s fair to say that I’m aware that I’m in a studio space in a harbour. Looking inland, I have a view of a graveyard where monumental slabs stand. One, a child’s grave, has brightly coloured windmills that are spinning into a blur in the high winds we’ve got today. The other way, I look out onto the water, where sails, masts and ropes form a lattice in front of the blunt facades of old red-brick warehouses.

So, with all of that in mind, here’s a couple of images I’ve made recently. I’m not yet sure how they play against the minotaur and other recent paintings, but there’s something very satisfying about the process of making these, which is something I don’t usually enjoy in digital art. I’m sure, with time, they’ll merge, but at the moment, I’m very pleased with them as they are, which is kind of important.

Images © Howard Hardiman.
All rights reserved.

The story was always envisioned as being finite, so I’m very pleased to be able to say that I’m working with Soaring Penguin Press to bring out a collected edition this Autumn. I was really pleased when I met up with the publisher and he had lots of very perceptive insights into the characters and the preoccupations of the story, so I’m confident in working with Soaring Penguin Press that they ‘get it’, which is a really important sense to be getting from a publisher. Particularly when your book is a sort-of coming of age romantic comedy with a backdrop of prostitution and drug abuse.

I’m also working with Zwerchfell Verlag in Germany on a translated edition, but the release date on that isn’t fixed yet because we want to allow the translation process as long as it needs until it’s right. That said, the parts that the translator sent me had me laughing at the right points and he’s got a really good grasp of the characters. He’s the same guy who worked with Lizz Lunney on Ich liebe Katzen und Katzen lieben mich so I’m really happy that it’s in the safe hands of someone with a good ear for humour.

Once release dates are known and once I know details of where your local bookshop should be pointed to to make sure they buy lots of copies, I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, this means that the copies I have left of the individual issues are now limited editions, and to celebrate the news that the book is coming out, I’m selling off the remaining stock at £15 for the full set!

All very exciting stuff! I daresay there’ll be more press stuff to follow soon!

Okay, I’m opening with a really quite daft photo from an MA Alumni talk I was part of at Camberwell last year, which was a brilliant learning experience for me as well as hopefully being useful for the MA students a year or two after my graduation.

I lifted that picture from this post by Sarah McIntyre about working with publishers which forms a little bit of a springboard into this post and is definitely worth a read.

I had a stall at the Comica Comiket on Saturday and, since it was being held at Central St Martins’ slightly less central new location, I was approached a few times by students who were asking for advice about getting started in comics.

Now, to be clear, I am by no means an expert in comics, so all I can do is talk about where I’m at and how I got here. What was amazing about the Alumni Day at Camberwell was that the invited speakers were drawn from each year that the MA has been running, so it provided a sense of where one might end up one year after graduating through to five or six years down the line. What was interesting for me was being able to see how the concerns of the speakers differed. The more recent graduates (like me) were concerned with finding outlets for their voices while the more experienced ones (like Sarah) were able to talk confidently about business models and revenue streams.

With that in mind, what advice would I offer to people just emerging into the realm of comics, illustration or art?

1: Don’t be too hard on yourself.

This is, basically, the main bit of advice I’d give anyone in any field of life, so let’s think how it might apply here. When I started out making zines, they were of quite terrible drawings done with chunky marker pens on post-it notes combined with little quips or things I’d overheard. It took me by surprise when people would pay a pound for the zine, and I was really thrown when people would pay to own the post-it notes. The thought of someone having one on their desk or their bedside table just baffled me.

Basically, I wasn’t being kind to myself. All I could see was that the drawing was basic and that it wasn’t how I’d like to be able to draw, so I tuned out the traits that made them quite desirable as objects. I didn’t listen when people said I had an ear for natural speech or a sense of characterisation. All I paid attention to was that people thought the drawing I’d done of a manta ray was actually a giraffe. Which, let’s face it, is a not particularly easy mistake to make.

I think that part of showing a little kindness to yourself is also accepting that you’ll always look back on earlier work and feel a little embarrassed. Already, I look back over The Lengths and see the spots where the foreshortening is clumsy or where I couldn’t figure out how to draw Dan from certain angles or how I struggled with Tony’s dark fur. It’s great to have a critical eye to look at where you can improve, but it’s crippling if you can’t show your work to anyone because you’re ashamed of being someone who’s starting out.

I do not have Sarah’s clear voice in my work, I don’t have her distinctive style. I’m still finding my way through my own visual language, and I’m fine with that and I’m sure Sarah would say the same about herself. I don’t have the same experience she has in making work for publication, but more widely than that, I don’t have the same life experiences as her, so to assume I could or should make work with the same assurance as she does is to be unfair to Sarah by implying her work is a skill that comes from rehearsal rather than personality and to be unfair to myself by removing the value of my own life experience. Sarah is absolutely amazing. Her work has so many qualities I don’t have in my own work. It’s bright, lively, joyous, witty and deceptively complicated. I love it, but I don’t want to be Sarah nor draw like her, because she does it brilliantly and I’m genuinely happy about that. My own work tends to be quieter and more inwardly-looking and this reflects my life experiences and not hers. That’s brilliant.

One of the main lessons of the MA was to learn that what you can do or could learn to do is not the same as what you should do. Rather than a course of acquiring new skills, the MA is one in which you learn what you don’t do and to be happy with that. I enrolled on the course feeling intimidated by the fact other people had done an undergraduate degree which has trained them in drawing, while I had given a portfolio which was mainly the same four awful pictures I used for My Tweaker Mum. I suspect I was the only person that year to enrol on the strength of a comic about my mother using crystal meth. (She doesn’t, but don’t tell her you know that, it’s much more fun to ask her how rehab’s going.)

When we did projects, I had to be okay with the riotously assured style of students like Will Morris.

There’s always going to be someone who does what they do better than you do what they do. That’s why they do it and you don’t.

And that’s brilliant, because it frees you up to do the things you want to do.

So, if, like me, your life experience allows you to make a comic about dog-headed prostitutes and their crippling self-doubt and destructive relationships with unsuitable men and with unsuitable drugs, then that’s brilliant. Sarah and Will don’t do that (yet, I might be wrong!), so that’s why I should.

It comes back to being nice to yourself.

2: Be nice to other people.

Just like not being really nasty to yourself is a pretty basic building block for sanity, so is affording other people a similar kindness. If someone asks for your opinion on their work, don’t say you hate it if it’s really not appealing, be honest and try to clarify what kind of advice the person was asking for. When you’re going to conventions either as a punter or as a stall-holder, do your best to be friendly, even if you’re nervous or tired. You don’t know if the person you’re getting annoyed with for asking questions when you’re tired might actually be an agent or might come back in five years with a request for a commission.

When I got the residency at Quay Arts, one of the pieces of feedback I had from the panel and from the other artists was that there were several artists who could have really used the residency well and whose work was brilliant, but Laura and I were the ones they felt like they could get along with for a year. Now, I doubt the other artists who applied spat at the interviewers or kicked over tables during their interview but I know I’d made a point to have at least as many questions as there were people interviewing me and that while I was taking I would make eye contact with all three of them, no matter how nervous I was feeling.

I can’t say I always manage it, though, but it’s something to aspire to. There are people I’ve misjudged on early impressions and there are things I’ve taken in a way that later turned out to be wrong. There are also people I’ve quite brutally lost my temper with and wound up shouting in their face, but that’s rare and it takes a lot to get me to that point.

It’s a simple kind of reciprocity, though, that if someone comes up and it’s clear they’d like your neighbour’s work more than your own, you direct them that way, because the chances are that your neighbour will do the same when someone comes up to their stall. To be fair, there weren’t many people coming up to Lizz (Lunney, who is amazing and you should worship if you do not already)’s stall saying “I like your romantic bison comic, but it really needs more ketamine-addled prostitutes with dog heads”, but I think you know what I mean.

3: Know how to balance the two.

Now, this is the bit that gets awkward. People will ask you to work for free and only you can decide if that’s the right thing for you. It’s kinder to say no and that you have to focus on your paid work than it is to take something on that you mess up because you can’t give it the time it deserves and because you don’t care about it. People may want to publish your work and you’ll have to make decisions about whether the deal is right for you. It’s pretty standard that when you freelance, you say yes to everything that comes your way when you start out, but soon you learn that you’re giving a better service to clients and to yourself if you’re able to turn things down that you wouldn’t be happy with the result of, whether that’s in terms of you not doing a good job or because you can’t afford to feed yourself if you do it.

Being kind to yourself doesn’t mean being arrogant about your talent, just as much as it doesn’t mean flaying away anything positive from it until there’s just useless, ragged bones left behind. I think it’s equally dangerous to be swayed when someone abhors or adores your work. What’s important is to reflect on it without either getting upset or turning into a princess and think about whether they had a point. Several people thought my drawing of a manta ray was a giraffe. They had a point, my drawing wasn’t clear, and if I wanted people to know whether I was drawing a manta ray or a giraffe, I could do with working on that.

Now, Sarah’s post deals far more articulately with issues around publishing and professionalism than I can offer at the moment, because she’s several years further down that path than I am. I’m just at the point of being taken seriously by publishers, and I suspect that they’re right to not have taken on the work I did before The Lengths, just because it wouldn’t have been something either I or they could look back on and say “yep, that’s a solid, good book”. It annoyed me no end when I was making Badger that it wasn’t a bestseller, but as much as I can see why it wasn’t, I can also see why it was really important that I did make it, and I’m overwhelmingly grateful to all the people who could see what was good about my work, before, perhaps, I realised where my focus really lay.

One of the comments on Sarah’s post talks about the majority of self-published work being rubbish and being the product of impatience or arrogance and I would utterly agree with that, but I think it’s crucially important to make work and to get used to people seeing it before you embark on a 200-page graphic novel. Before The Lengths, the longest story I’d really told was in Polaroids from Other Lives, which was only twelve images with floating text, so I really wasn’t ready to make a longer book, but it was fundamentally important as a basis from which to progress.

So, I suppose, a significant part of this third piece of advice is that balancing your ego and the audience’s experience of your work is patience and acceptance that the first few things you release will inevitably be flawed, but until you’ve finished those flawed pieces of work, you can’t get to the heart of what you do. I was chatting briefly to Isabel Greenberg about this at Comiket and she said I’d been smart to release my early work as When Pigeons Weep rather than putting my name on it first, as it means those early drawings won’t come up quite so quickly when people search for me online. Using a pseudonym or the like also gives you a mask to hide behind while you’re putting work out in the early stages, so it helps in the short term, too.

As a little recap to finish this off because I’m in Poland and it’s sunny and I want to get an embarrassing pink face to prove I’m British, here’s a bullet-point list of things I found helpful.

1 Be kind to yourself.
1.1 Listen to what’s good about your work as well as what you can learn.
1.2 Learn to love that you are not other people and your art is not their art.
1.3 Love the things that make you who you are.
1.4 Have interests outside of the things you directly make.
1.5 Look after your physical and mental health.

2 Be nice to other people.
2.1 Try not to inflict a bad day on other people.
2.2 Send people to other artists for things you can’t offer them.
2.3 Smile and make eye contact even if it takes an effort.
2.4 Accept that first impressions can be wrong.
2.5 Celebrate the work other people produce alongside celebrating your own.

3 Balance the two.
3.1 Be prepared to say “no” or “not now”.
3.2 Don’t let good or bad feedback change your sense of self.
3.3 Listen out for fair comments about your work and things you can learn.
3.4 Accept that it takes time to find your voice or for people to find you.
3.5 You’re no use to anyone if you’re too poor to buy food.

In the field of any other business, I remember hearing that the best advice if you want to learn to make comics is to make comics, but I can’t remember who said that. I do remember a talk where Sam Taylor-Wood said the best advice she’d had as an artist was “don’t get a good job. If you have a fall-back career, you’ll fall back.”

Other than that, I’d say I’m finding Philippa Perry’s “How to Stay Sane” and Scarlett Thomas’ “Monkeys With Typewriters” both excellent books at the moment, and they bounce off one another very well. John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” is another excellent read, but the things I like or find useful will probably not be the things you like or find useful. If that’s the case, embrace it. Draw while you’re sat up a tree, write in a pillow-fort, on the toilet, when you’re happy, sad or whatever it is that makes you work your best, and be okay with days when you’re just not in the drawing zone.

Climb a tree, build a fort, go to the loo, be happy, sad or whatever makes you feel good about yourself and it will follow in no time at all.

Angela Lansbury as The Joker

It’s been a slightly frantic few weeks for me, some of which I’ll be able to share with you in a week or so beyond daft little hints on twitter that I’ve let slip. One of the projects has involved drawing a lot of pictures of Jessica Fletcher. Now, you might have guessed that I’ve always been happier drawing animals than people, and likenesses are something I’ve avoided, but I’m of the opinion that the things that scare you are the things you need to do. Sometimes. Don’t throw yourself off a cliff without an adult’s supervision, etc etc.

That means that Jessica Fletcher’s face is now etched into my memory, like, well, you know, those lines by her lips or her amazing bone structure and big, bright eyes. So, even my warm-down drawings have wound up being of her. I’m thinking I might try doing some prints of this to take with me to Comiket this weekend, and a version of it might end up in one of the projects I can’t quite tell you about yet!

At Comiket, I’ll have The Lengths, Badger (I’m almost run out) and prints. I’m all out of Peckham Invalids now. I’ll be giving away copies of Pieces of the Puzzle to anyone spending over £10. The prints are a4, signed on 310gsm photo rag paper, have a border for framing and will cost £10 each or three for £20. The A4 prints aren’t a limited edition, but let me know if you’d like to reserve a larger version for when they’re available later this year.

More next week, I’ll see some of you at Comiket!

I’ll be exhibiting this image of The Minotaur, along with other mythological images as a part of the Open Studios weekends on the Isle of Wight in July. These will be my first exhibitions that form the artist residency I have with Quay Arts.

The first exhibition is in my studio, Jubilee Stores, which is in Newport, a five minute walk from the galleries (and lovely cafe) at Quay Arts. Come along on the 20th or 21st of July.

The following weekend, I’ve been invited to exhibit at The Depozitory in Ryde. It’s a beautiful converted chapel, very close to the port in Ryde. Do note, however, that The Depozitory itself has a few access issues, you need to go up a few steps to get into the building, then up another flight of stairs to get to the exhibition space upstairs. If mobility is an issue for you, I’d recommend coming to Jubilee Stores, there’s two disabled parking bays and level access, as well as the all-important accessible toilet.

It’s a chance to see how my work is progressing. There’ll be my mythological images, also quite a few animal studies and artwork from Badger, too. I’ll have my comics for sale, as well, if you’ve not yet had a chance to pick them up.

I’ll be selling both original artwork and reproductions and offering them both framed or unframed. Prints will be in limited editions at a3 size and unlimited editions at a4, so there should be something for everyone. Well, everyone who likes the kind of work I make.

There’s more details about Open Studios on the Isle of Wight Arts site, http://www.isleofwightarts.com/index/ and I think some of the ferry companies might be offering deals for those weekends, but I’m not sure just yet. Travelling as a foot passenger is much cheaper, and the island’s bus system is pretty good and gives you the chance to enjoy the scenery.

I’ll be putting up more images on this site and on my Open Studios page as the dates approach. I’m really excited to be able to show in my studio space and incredibly flattered to be offered exhibition space at The Depozitory. There’ll be lots of great things to see, so if you’ve been tempted to visit the island, I think July’s the right time.

Now, obviously, Nelson’s not a comic book artist, but one of the escorts I interviewed who informed Nelson’s character a great deal was a phenomenal businessman. He was taking home about three thousand pounds a week on average. During our interview, he told me about all of the things he put down as business expenses. He was one of very few escorts I met who chose to pay his taxes. Like Nelson in the book, he had an accountant who knew about his job and wasn’t a client. “Don’t mix work and leather” was another bit of his advice.

He told me that his expenses bill included his gym membership, personal trainer three times a week, cosmetic surgery about once a year, haircuts, teeth whitening, clothes for work, sex toys for work, travel for work, protein shakes… his accountant even managed to find a way of accounting for the money he was spending on illegal steroids in case he was ever thoroughly audited.

Now, it’s not an easy ride for an escort to stay on the right side of the law with money, but artists I know often seem a little lax around keeping clear accounts, and I thought it might be useful to share a little bit of what I’ve learned over the last fifteen years of being self-employed, first as a sign language interpreter and now as an artist.

First off, if you’ve not set yourself up with the tax office, do it immediately. If you’re serious about working as an artist and you’re selling your work at conventions or online, you’re committing tax fraud by not submitting accounts. I shouldn’t have to underline the moral case for paying taxes, since it’s being done to death at the moment in the media. Suffice to say, you have no ground to stand on if you’re complaining about corporate tax avoidance the pocketing your take at the end of a convention without keeping books for it.

It’s not just a moral case, but a professional one, too. If you’re selling comics or artwork, being registered self-employed makes you clear to yourself that you’re taking it seriously. Until you do, you’re paying for all of your printing and your art materials out of your own money, and that’s money you’ve already been taxed on once, so it makes sense to be clear about what’s for you and what’s for the business. If you’re running at a loss and paying more in printing than you take, then still register and still claim as you should be able to get some tax back for what you’re putting into the business.

Now, the next step is to get good advice. I’m not a tax advisor or a financial advisor, but it’s worth getting yourself an accountant in the first few years at least. I do my own accounts now I’ve had long enough to understand it, but I suffer whenever I need to prove my earnings, like when I claimed housing benefit for while my back was stopping me from earning. They need audited accounts and it’s much easier if you have an accountant who can provide that.

Assuming you’re self-employed, rather than a limited company (which might make sense if you’re taking in good money) and I’m assuming you’re not paying VAT (which might make sense if you’re buying a lot of taxed things), the next step is to make a distinction between your personal money and the money for your business. It an be a business bank account, but, according to the HMRC advisor I spoke to, it doesn’t have to be one if you’re trading under your own name. Get your paypal sales to go into your work account. Send invoices with your work account details and, if you can, bank the takings from conventions into the work account.

The whole point of accounts is that they give other people an account of money in and out. The clue’s in the name. If you have to prove your finances, the accounts tell the story.

Next up, you need to set up an accounts book for yourself. It can be as simple as a book in which you write a list of money in and expenses that you can come back to after the tax year’s over. I usually use a spreadsheet so it can do the maths for me.

You need to list all of the money coming into the business, even if it doesn’t go to the business account. Write down the date, what it was for, who you were paid by and how much you were paid. So, for instance, if at this month’s Comiket, I sold only one Badger book all day, it’d be:

20th April Convention Sales Comiket £5.00

Do the same for paypal sales, sales done through a shop or however you sell it. Wherever possible, keep a record of the transaction. If it’s a paypal sale, paypal let you download a ledger for a particular period. If it’s convention sales, keep your sales tally for the day. If it’s a shop, get a receipt or write them an invoice, showing what you sold and what discount was taken, then the total you received.

Keeping accounts for your sales is pretty straightforward. If you give someone a book for review or as a gift, keep a note of it, as it’s proof that they didn’t buy their copy and you’ve not pocketed the cash.

Expenditure gets a bit more complicated and it’ll vary greatly from person to person. Basically, if you need something for your work, then it’s a business expense. Immediately, you’ll be able to think of things like:

* Printing costs
* Pens and paper
* Postage

…and maybe even things that don’t begin with the letter P. However, you surely know that there’s more to your job than buying paper and pens, using the pens to mark the paper and selling the result. Think through each step of your work and look at the costs involved. If you have a studio, list your rent. If you work from home, talk to a tax advisor about how to calculate how much of your rent and bills go on your business rather than yourself. If you use a computer (and if you don’t, how are you reading this?) then at least a proportion of it is a business expense. Think about how much of each item is for personal use and how much for work. For me, my phone is about half for work and half for sending stupid photos of sheep to people, which isn’t really work, so I claim half of my phone bill. Of course, if your work is drawing sheep, then that might count, too.

Be realistic, though. You can claim for the comics you read, you may be able to claim for theatre or cinema tickets and you should be claiming for entry to galleries. Whether or not you claim for the cupcakes you have in the Tate Modern Members’ Room is really your call. Personally, I tend not to, but for some people, they do their best work on a sugar high when they have vertigo, so it might be more relevant to their work.

If you go to a comics convention, claim for the table registration costs, claim for the tablecloth, claim for the travel expenses getting there. If it’s not in your home town and you have to eat out while you’re there, that’s a work expense, particularly if you’re talking to other artists over dinner. Getting pissed afterwards is a harder thing to justify, though. I think recreational drug use stays off the record too, otherwise you’re going to end up with a suspicious “flowers bill” on the accounts and that’s just a bit tawdry.

If you’re not making much money at the moment through your work and it’s your only work, then there’s a few things to look at. In the immediate, urgent moment, I’d say get advice about welfare benefits for people on low incomes. You might qualify for housing benefit, council tax benefit and working tax credits, but if you’re artificially listing loads of spurious things to be able to qualify for them and your business is taking in loads of money, be prepared for a pretty justifiable grilling from the benefits people and think quite seriously about whether you’re being moral by not just avoiding tax, but claiming benefits for poverty.

That said, if you need that financial help to keep your business running, claim it. It’s a choice between that and winding up bankrupt and with no business, risking your home and your future profitability. Swallow your pride and just work hard to no longer need support if you can, but accept it while you need it. I’d also say you should look seriously at the outgoings for your business and see if you’re under-charging for your work once you’ve factored all of that in. I was only able to charge £3 for an issue of The Lengths because the print run was big enough and because I was also working in museums at the time as well. People genuinely do know that a company selling 100,000 units can cut the price a lot more than an individual making their own comics. If you have to charge £5 or more for your comic, then that’s how much it needs to cost. There’s also a lot of considerations to make about where you’re selling your work and who is buying it that comes into pricing and I won’t get into that now, since this is a bit more about tax.

If you’ve not registered your business yet, or you know you’ve been slipping a bit with the accounts, tomorrow is the day to get your books in order and set up good systems for the year ahead. Go and look at the HMRC pages on self-employment and think about contacting an organisation like your local Chamber of Commerce for advice on setting up. Trust me, they’re very used to people in that confusing, early stage of working for themselves and they will be able to help.

As I say at the beginning, I got my tax advice from the HMRC helpline and from a prostitute, so I’m by no means an expert. The basic thing is to keep your money and your business money apart from one another, and to keep records of everything coming in and going out from your business. Whether that’s a shoebox of receipts and bank statements that you pass to an accountant or a double-entry book (shush, yes, the prostitute kept one of those) and date-ordered, cross-referenced files of receipts, just be sure you have evidence to show of the health of your business and so you know how much tax you should be paying for what you’ve received.

Anyway, as a parting comment, if you’re claiming for comic books you’ve bought this year, perhaps you’d like to buy some of mine before the tax year ends! If so, head to http://cutebutsad.bigcartel.com – and either way, I hope this has been a little bit helpful. I know talking about business methods is the kind of thing we want to slam our faces into the corners of tables rather than do, but it needs doing. Save your pretty face and figure out a system for yourself!

So! Yesterday, I was able to pick up the keys for the studio in Newport that I’ll be sharing for the next year with printmaker Laura Hathaway.

I had the interview a couple of weeks ago, after a slightly nervous and confused application form and a set of emailed photos of my pictures of pagan gods dancing around naked. I think I’d learned my lesson when I’d gone to Quay Arts to see if they wanted to sell any prints and I’d panicked and put in lots of cute animal things, which she turned straight past, looking for the mythological images. It really does seem to be the right move to show people the things you believe in most of all as that belief will shine through.

I’ll admit I was a bit anxious about the interview – I had to plan what to take according to what I’d be able to carry while on crutches, which didn’t set me in the best frame of mind to feel hugely confident. However, the panel were lovely and went out of their way to make sure I was comfortable, even to the point of stopping the across-the-table interview when they could see it was getting painful for me to sit still.

I talked about my work to date and the directions I seem to be heading in at the moment, away from comics as a primary focus and more towards single images on a theme without an explicit narrative.

The scheme gives two artists in the early stages of their career studio space within Jubilee Stores for a year, with mentoring and supervision throughout and offers us the chance to either exhibit or publish a body of work at the end of the time. It’s such a generous project and has come at exactly the right moment for me, where I’m figuring out what to do after finishing The Lengths, which, let’s remember, was my MA Visual Art project before it continued as my main project for a year graduation.

The studio is in Newport Harbour, so a wonderfully central location for the island. From one side, we have this lovely view of the boats and the old warehouses, while inland, we’re flanked by a bus museum and a graveyard. From the window of Studio Five, where I am now, there’s an access door out, facing the cemetery. While this might sound a shade morbid, I really like the view. There’s something wonderfully tranquil about the field of gravestones and daffodils. More than the boats, I find these reminders of death and regrowth to be very calming.

Right now, I’m sat in the studio, tucked into a corner with my sit/stand desk and the space feels almost embarrassingly huge. White walls, pale floorboards spattered with paint.

I daresay that empty, uncluttered feeling really will not last long. I want to get some of my pictures framed and up on the walls to populate the place and Laura should be moving her things in tonight or tomorrow.

We have a week or so to settle in, then we start on the planning for the year ahead with the staff from Quay Arts. I will be exhibiting at the Open Studios Weekends in July, here in Jubilee Stores and at the beautiful Depozitory in Ryde as well. My focus for the first few months will be finishing off the projects I’ve got on the go at the moment, including illustrating a wonderfully barmy book about Angela Lansbury for which the brief was “imagine David Lynch had directed Murder, She Wrote and go from there”. That should be out early this Autumn.

Once I’ve got that finished (hopefully, I can show you some preview pages soon), I’m going to focus on trying to make some larger work than I’ve been able to do for years. It seems silly to have a big space like this and to continue working to a size that I’d settled on to avoid taking up too much room at home.

Anyway, suffice to say,

I’m really excited and this echoey room will quickly fill up. The studio is overwhelmingly friendly, the artists working here tend to down tools for lunch at the same time each day so there’s a chance to catch up and chat every day. That’ll be a refreshing change after the very solitary approach to work while I’ve been making comics.

If you’ve come here from the articles in the local press that there’ve been this week, welcome! You can find my comics over at http://cutebutsad.bigcartel.com - I’d best get on with drawing terrifying pictures of Jessica Fletcher!

My portrait of Munson is now available to order. 10% of the sale price will go to Macmillan Cancer Support as a part of the Arctic2013 charity expedition. You can read more about the process of creating this painting here. You can buy your prints, as well as my comics and other work here.

When the previous Pope came to London, there were vocal protests about the visit and accusations flying back and forth about each other’s beliefs. It prompted me to write the following in my old blog, which I’ll transfer across here now as it seems pertinent.

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Militant Atheism isn’t why I oppose the Pope.

It’s more a sense of agnosticism that’s anchored very deeply within a set of beliefs based upon a Christian philosophical framework.

I don’t often talk in too much detail about faith, apart from to lambast it, but perhaps rather than join a chorus of voices repeating a mantra of finding fault with the way of life that others adhere to, it’s better to assert a positive standpoint and state clearly what I personally believe in and why that sets me in opposition to some faith groups.

It’s a common point of faith among most faiths that inflated pride is a sin, and although I know I’m often someone who falls into that bragging pit of temptation and ego, I think there’s a line between having an inflated sense of your own importance, which is bad enough and assuming that we are in any way capable of knowing or understanding the infinite, universal mind of that thing that religions describe as God.

As a person with a great interest in science, it’s hard not to be drawn into a sense of profound awe and wonder at the profound majesty and complexity of the machine of the universe. The way that energy and matter interact to create a reality that confounds our capacity to comprehend it is something as humbling as it is compelling. To try to understand the way that this grand engine works is not to detract in any matter whatsoever from the sense of deep respect for the fact that it exists, let alone that we can only just scratch the questions of what where when and how, but are yet far from understanding any notion of why it exists, and we within it, at all.

To be drawn to understand the microscopic or the macroscopic sciences, to witness the rules that bind everything from gravity to immunology to how a bicycle’s brakes work, to me, does not diminish in any manner, a sense that there’s a sense of connectedness and poetry to the universe that dwarfs human endeavour and it doesn’t take much to understand that the teaching tool that says if the Earth’s a marble and the moon’s a peppercorn, then the Sun’s as wide as I am tall to start to function as a parable for how my own struggles and achievements are nothing compared to the scale of the cosmos.

Science does not seek to destroy the sense of wonder that Faith encourages, but to inspire it in new ways.

That’s not to say that Science and Faith occupy the same intellectual role. I think that’s a logical error that Stephen Hawking was making when he said there was no room for God in his cosmology. Perhaps that’s true for him personally, but I think it needs to be unpacked before it can be taken alone as a statement. I think it’s very fair to say that few people of religious conviction remain unswayed by the evidence that empirical science puts forward in order to demonstrate how the universe exists, and to describe what happened in her earliest moments. It falls apart when you add in some omnipotent extradimensional entity, because you can say, “Yeah, ok, so that’s how He did it, but He made it that way.” and we’re none the wiser.

And it’s that none the wiser that I want to think about for a little while.

It’s a fundamental tenet of Christianity that you must not worship false idols. Partly, to me, it seems that that’s rooted in a desire to stop you from joining other ethnic or faith groups at a time when the faith would have been a very real tribal set of values, but I have a slightly different take on it.

We should not attempt to represent God in any manner, because it’s inexcusably arrogant for us to in any way whatsoever assume that we, as insignificant pinpricks in the infinite tapestry of the universe, to have any idea what the image on that tapestry might be, or what the hand or hands that wove it might look like – if they exist in any way we can understand, or if this is even a meaningful metaphor or if there are hands there. We cannot know. We simply don’t have the right perspective to ever know, nor should we pretend to know.

Pride is first among the deadly sins for a reason; it implies that you have lost a sense of your own insignificance in the face of the infinite almighty and omnipotent divine. This is something I believe in, and that is why I believe that the idea of religions that place intermediaries between individuals and that nebulous sense of wonder that we sense might be some resonant connection between us and something much greater is a woefully arrogant sin of pride, even by their own rules.

I was brought up in a family where my parents wouldn’t have me Christened, reasoning the future of my soul was my own business. They taught me about Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and any other Faith they could find out about; but they also let me read stories and I think my standpoint on faith comes very much from this upbringing, as much as the upbringing of a Catholic leads them down their own path.

I do not believe that religion is inherently dangerous, not by any measure. I am an artist, I tell stories, make pictures and write poetry. I would be a hypocrite to say I did not believe that symbols have a power beyond their physical forms to inspire, transform or provide meaning in troubled times. I believe that the Bible contains some incredibly powerful stories with profound and lasting value as lessons for how we can and should live, but those lessons are the same lessons we learn of human kindness and frailty that we are shown in Greek legend, Fairy Tales, Shakespeare or Eastenders.

To me, it doesn’t matter where you learn your morals from, so long as your morals are sound, so to proclaim that one Faith is right while another is wrong is to say that Shakespeare teaches us about human existence in a way that Dot Cotton does not, or that Alan Moore does not. It’s a meaningless distinction, and dangerous if it leads us into conflict, when we could instead celebrate that Shakespeare still teaches us that vaulted ambition leads us into dangerous turmoil, that Eastenders teaches us that the truth will always come out and Alan Moore tells us that the world around us is interwoven with symbolic power we should be mindful of.

Humility, honesty and mindfulness are all wonderful virtues, and I think we’re losing all of those if we find ourselves saying that there’s only one true path to gaining those, or that there are some arbitrary exclusions from virtue. If we say that anyone is inferior by virtue of being female or male, gay or otherwise, disabled or not, then we’re playing into a notion that there’s a hierarchy of humanity that’s based on what you are, rather than what you do, and if that prejudiced is couched in a rationale of holiness or ritual cleanliness, then we’re back into the awful muddle I described before about the arrogance of assuming that it’s possible to understand the mind of God.

It’s not. There is no intermediary between anyone and the infinite divine, because it is around and within everything, because it is everything. Its universal nature makes it, perhaps oddly, impossible to detect and certainly impossible for us to define. If God exists, God exists everywhere and everywhen and beyond that, and the universal nature of God therefore means there’s no meaningful difference whether God exists or does not.

To say that God is irrelevant is not to say that the teachings of Faith or the power of art are meaningless. If God is like Shrodinger’s Cat within a universal box we can’t ever open, there and not there at once, then what matters instead is what we can know and what we can deal with, and that means we must accept responsibility for our own actions. With a God who may or may not exist, we cannot abdicate responsibility for good fortune or ill to some mystical force, but instead we must accept that what happens happens and that what we do has consequences that we may or may not witness directly.

I don’t believe it’s possible to live a life free from causing harm or from being harmed, but I think that if we remove a pressure to make an external and anthropomorphic entity responsible for a moral framework for what happens, then we can at least try to take personal pride in our own actions and feel remorse for when we inflict harm on others.

All I can hope to do is to attempt to tread lightly on this beautiful, majestic and complex universe, whether or not we see a divine hand in its poetry, and that’s enough for me. If that means refuting anyone’s right to stand between me and that Romantic sense of wonder, then I will defend my beliefs.

I am not a militant atheist, nor a militant secularist. I simply believe it’s not for us to pretend it’s for us to know anything about God at all. Just be the best person you can be, using whichever story you need to remind yourself of how best to do that.

That’s my standpoint, what’s yours?