Going for an imaginary jaunt through an art gallery of one picture...

Date: 20 February 2009 11:44:44

Nearly there on Sylver, 20 pages to go - in terms of re-jigging characters that is, typing (sigh) yet to come - and taking an achey breakey for a mo'. Get up, stretch, move about, sit back down and do a bit of blogging.

Prior to that I was having a mooch around le timewasternet and, somehow, found myself on a 2o00ad tribute site. Now, regular readers (hi mum and Ian :) ) will know that 2000ad was possibly the most formative collection of art for me but I didn't know if I've mentioned THAT image. Because, surprisingly, there was one image, and one image alone, that changed me around from doodler to determined wannabe artist. I did mention going up to Forbidden PLanet to get the artists scrawl on a sketchpad of mine but that picture. Wow. The Scret of Nimh made me want to be an animator, that was earlier and equally imprinted on my mind, but one picture alone made me hold a pencil in my hand for every waking moment after I had seen it.

Can't find it on the webs, which is a bit of a shame as it should be on someone's gallery somewhere, but in a strip called 'City of the Damned' I jumped into 2000ad for the first time, half way through the stories telling. In the centre of the comic, as a splash page, was an image of the hero, Judge Joe Dredd, precursor of Jack Bauer himself for all the diplomacy and gentleness he brought to the table, struggling across a burning, jagged floor, too tired to stand, blinded by monsters, near death. The words said something like "For you are a Judge.... And it is your duty" giving him all the motivation I needed to understand having seen the character for the very first time.

Ian Gibson this is all your fault. You are the reason I'm not a postman.

Actually it was a whole hooting heck of an image. Gibson's - correctly - more famous for his signature characters Sam Slade and Halo Jones and both were truly wonderful comic strips... But his depiction of Dredd on heat (sorry) was not just an eye opener but a brain opener for me. Other artists would have done the picture differently: Hicklenton would have made it ugly and grisly - possibly more suited to the image itself, Hughes would have made it very angular and possibly pop arty, maybe focusing on the flames and the colours of pain as, thinking about it, would have McCarthy. Bolland might have focused on the shadows cast from the napalm floor and others... Bisley would have slapped a few hallucinatory half dressed fairies? Let's just say that if I was rich, which I patently am not, I would commission a number of 2000ad artists to redraw that panel and have each and every picture framed. It's the one image that I can look to and point at and say 'that's the one where my journey as an mock artist began'.

In my mind I think I'd go for the aforementioned artists plus Kev O Neil, Ron Smith, Scarfe, Dave McKean, Kent Williams, Mike Mignola, McMahon, Kennedy, McNeil and thinking about it a whole host of them, too many to name, all re-creating one picture in their own unique style, all making it their own. I'd LOVE to see that and, in my mind, I think that's the gallery exhibition of art that I'm going to imagine myself walking down for a little while over a cup of coffee.

And when I get to the last image, the Mona Lisa shot of the image under a stark light at the end of a corridor, held in reverence for all it means to so many people (and by so many people I mean 'me') and viewed in stark respect that'll be Ian's original. Possibly my favourite piece of art in the world.

Like I say can't find the image. Here's another Gibson rendering of Judge Dredd... Not quite the same but hey, sets my imaginary jaunt to the gallery going.

Apparently, at the end of the year, we're going to have a Creative Technologies art blogsebition. I was asked yesterday if I blog at all... Had to say that I did, a little, but now I'm wondering if I should just have stayed schtumm... Ah well. May well be a lot of fun.