Come back soon! There will be stuff, and things.

First in a series of ink-on-paper freeform drawings. They started as a guilty pleasure - the messing about I would do when I should have been painting, doing comics, writing or whatever else. But now I quite like them in their own right.

This one was done to pass the time on a train/boat journey from Oxford to Dublin.

But it hasn’t been my own memes at all, lately (if anyone can claim ownership of them, that is, and unless you count the idea of a fringe festival, which I don’t). Mostly facilitating other people’s. I’ve been really busy organising Oxfringe, especially the art exhibitions and the stand-up comedy. I used to paint - yeah, and even write and make comics - back in the mists of time. I might again, soon, in that fabled future time known as After The Fringe. See you then.

This thing is made out of waste bits of paint left behind on my palette after painting sessions. I thought they looked cool and started saving them in a bag. In further proof that it never rains but it pours, due to a complicated and rather dull series of events it’s ended up hanging in the Jam Factory, near the railway station. It’s a bit rubbish in the photo, but it looks much better if you see it in person.

The Jam Factory are having an exhibition with no selection panel, catching the overflow from the Oxford Open. I’m there now and they still have lots of wall space - so if any artists are reading this and fancy hanging something up in public for a month or so, you still can.

It’s interesting seeing what pitches up in an exhibition with no entry criteria except that your stuff should fit within a metre cubed. There are paintings there I actually yearn to own and can’t take my eyes off, like Emma Fordham’s lovely rich mysterious collages of photo cutouts and paint. Sebastian Humphreys’ picture assembled entirely from coloured matchsticks laid out in a herringbone pattern is cool too. Then there’s the installation of six iBooks hung together to make a sort of six-pane window showing a static picture of a girl in the shower, with a sound file of running water playing. I ought to like something like this but it leaves me completely cold; it must have taken a lot of expense and effort to say… what? I’m not sure it says anything. But I have the nasty feeling that if I saw it in the Tate Modern I’d cut it a lot more slack.

Then there’s the ones that are too messagey in a stating-the-blindingly-obvious sort of way, like the plastic bottle with “You are looking at a suspended sentence” written on it. Why not just leave it blank and name the artwork “Suspended Sentence”? Gah.

This is probably unfair - at best, if you stretch, all my own painting says is “w00t! Pretty colours! Plus, recycling is good m’kay?” But this is a blog, not a livejournal, and I seem to think bloggers are obliged to be opinionated.

Thanks for the link, Bugpowder!

I had a fantastic evening. Thanks to everyone who came along, chatted and drank and bought paintings and joined in the mapping bee - people gathered round a big round table with their heads bent, drawing features in on printouts of the maps: magnetic anomalies, pterodactyl, wee boats, a series of tubes, spiral towers, panicked pigs fleeing into the sea, an island of surprisingly pleasant exile, a BMX park, a town called Peristalsis…

I’d filled a folder with blank maps so café-goers could draw on them and post them in the box provided throughout the month of the exhibition. But you guys almost ran me out of maps. There were only three left at the end of the night. I’ll have to go back with another sheaf of them tomorrow. I am not complaining; this is a very good thing.