The Young Vic, Drawing Dead Things and Graphic Medicine
Hello! Here are a few things I’ve been meaning to write about. First up is a comic I did for them Young Vic a while back. It’s a pattern comic showing a man growing older while sitting in the audience at the Young Vic theatre and is for their legacy brochure. A really fun job for a great client!
Last Friday I was also incredibly lucky enough to be invited by House of Illustration to a medical illustration masterclass at The Royal College of Surgeons run by Joanna Cameron of the Medical Artists Education Trust. I learnt so much about what medical illustration involves- from digital art, to patient pamphlets (minus the blood and gore!) to facial reconstruction. Apparently the medical illustration students learn more anatomy than medical students! Thanks so much to Joanna and House of Illustration for the opportunity to spend a day learning. Here is some of the dead thing in jars I drew during the class…
It’s really interesting to hear of more artists sitting on the borders of medicine and illustration much like the comic artists, doctors and academics who I met at Ian William’s Graphic Medicineconference. I gave a paper at Graphic Medicine in at Leeds Art Gallery on November 17th titled‘The Body as a Canvas in Comics: An artists examines the health of the social body in her graphic novel The House That Groaned‘. I’ll upload a wee youtube video of the presentation soon as I did a lot of original art for it. I talked alongside some amazing comic artists: Nicola Steeten, Daryl Cunningham, Paula Knight, Sarah Leavitt (talking about her book Tangels and her mother’s experience of Alzheimers), Andrew Godfery who draws comics about his Cystic Fibrosis, Katie Green whose book ‘Lighter Than My Shadow’ about her battle with anorexia will be published by Cape aaannnd MK Czerwiec whose comic ‘Taking Turns’ really inspired me. It’s a combination of comic memoires and oral history about her experience as a nurse on an AIDS unit in Chicago. It really opened up my eyes to the way we can allow others voices within our comics. Read it now!The talk followed a similar one I gave at the Transitions conference at Birkbeck University of London a few week earlier. Both conferences were a little like spending the day at ‘comic university’ and it was fascinating to listen to lectures from Arabian comics to architectural comics. Inspiring stuff!
