Well we’re on our second apocalypse since 2020, but I hope this email finds you well.
Drawing Every Dog Portraits
I had an unusually quiet March so whenever that hits I start looking at making new stuff. To that end I’ve started a new weekly series, Drawing Every Dog. I’m basing these small (A5) dog portraits on photos in The Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds by Juliette Cunliffe. I’ve 3 drawn so far: Bracco Italiano, Brittany, and English Setter. I do intend to go through the whole book so that’ll be somewhere in the region of 400 breeds!
Televisual Matters
My big lockdown watch was The Good Fight, which I’ve only just finished after a few years of chasing it across platforms (I ended up finishing it on the RTE Player, where the entire thing resides). It’s one of the greatest and possibly most undervalued TV shows of the last 40 years, compared to the hype around Mad Men and The West Wing for example. I’ve never seen The Good Wife so it can be watched without that (although plenty of characters turn up over the run). It has one of the most rousing monologues I’ve ever seen. Yes, you should punch a Nazi.
I’ve started Doom Patrol, based on the DC characters (and Grant Morrison’s run in particular I think?). I have complete superhero fatigue but this is inventive and character-driven with bizarre humour (collective orgasms on a sentient street, a goat that swallows a town…) And it’s got Alan Tudyk in it.
Boooks
I finished The Rose Field, the last of the His Dark Materials prequel/sequel trilogy, The Books of Dust. I was a huge fan of the original books and while the Books of Dust have interesting themes and ideas, and glorious woodblock illustrations by Christopher Wormell, the blend of retcons and abandoned and unresolved concepts make The Rose Field an unsatisfying conclusion to a muddled trilogy. Pullman made huge sacrifices in Lyra’s world(s) to explore the pulverising mundanity of capitalism, and perhaps that was the point.
I’m now (finally) reading The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney, which like all good books has sat on a bedside stool untouched for years until I exploited the appetite a fat book like The Rose Field gave me again for reading. So far so exquisitely-plotted.
Film:
I made a short film for the Little Cinema’s Wes Anderson Night where I presented it to a live audience. I had some Young People coming up to me to tell me there was excitement when they heard I’d made another film which was just such a lovely thing to hear.
Cartoons:
Micheál Martin shamed us again this St Patrick’s Day. He’s incapable of any criticism of condemnation of the Orange Despot in case it affects the Irish economy. Well let’s see how good fuel rationing and shortages are going to be for us Micheál.
The recent unpleasantness with generative AI “caricature” slop was a silk purse from a sow’s ear for one enterprising caricature artist in the UK as she turned the trend to her advantage.
On a related note: Facebook faked viewer numbers and told everyone video hosted on their platform was the way to go. Newsrooms fell for it hard and it decimated the newspaper industry.
AI companies told everyone generative AI was the way to go and companies like Buzzfeed started replacing workers with the words-out-of-a-hat machine. Guess what’s happening now?
African cartoonists are under pressure but are coming up with creative ways to avoid censorship.
Music
I’m really enjoying Die Spitz at the moment. One of my main Bandcamp listens in the car!
Live Work
In March I worked at the heats of the Student Enterprise Awards in Athlone (I’ll also be at the finals!). I’ve been doing this for a few years now and it’s always a joy to meet so many motivated young people presenting their projects to the judges with a confidence I don’t remember kids even having when I was at school. I’d loads of craic drawing a mix of school students and third-level students as the event was held on campus at TUS Athlone.
I was also in Fitzgeralds Woodlands House Hotel Adare for a wedding!
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