An Artist's Evolution
Packing up in spring for our house move, I found this: it was my mum's first attempt at capturing my cat The Bear (RIP) via a quick chalk sketch. 2012, perhaps? So simple, but so great, and it proved to be the catalyst for what has been a flood of creativity since her retirement from her teaching job...
For those who didn't get to know The Bear during his life, he's featured in several of my non-fiction books and at one point, not long before his death, at the impressive age of 21, in December 2016, he had over 325,000 followers on Twitter. This is the tribute I wrote to him.
The Bear remained my mum's main muse for a year or two and pretty soon she was coming up with linoprints like this of him.
I'm especially fond of this one of him busking in my old kitchen in Norfolk:
The print was based on a real incident, during a time of worrying penury for The Bear, where, despite learning all of the songs from the first two Leonard Cohen LPs and Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat, he earned zero pence for a whole day's performance on the special troubadour's pitch I had reserved for him just to the left of our fridge.
This was in fact a bit of a shaky time for me and The Bear. I'd essentially been told by the publishing industry that I wasn't allowed to write books any more and had lost much of my regular newspaper work so couldn't afford to stay in my house and had to sell my car and a load of other stuff just to have enough money to pay my bills before moving out. But then, with The Bear's help, I quickly wrote another book and set up a Twitter account based around all the things in the world that The Bear was sad about. I remember telling a close acquaintance that I thought, if the Twitter account could reach 50,000 followers by the book's publication, in October 2013, the book might do ok, and that acquaintance, with a look that might be normally reserved for a sick, delusional child, gently breaking the news to me that such a thing could never happen. As it turned out, The Bear and I achieved considerably above our follower target, and the book became a top ten bestseller immediately upon publication.
It seems a shame, in retrospect, that my mum's illustrations of my cats didn't go in that book, nor the marginally better one that followed it, since her prints were getting so, so good - this one of Roscoe (who some of you might know better as the actor, influencer and designer Philippa Islington-Smythe) for example...
After that I did finally persuade my mum to illustrate the inside of my books, beginning with 2017's 21st-Century Yokel, for which she contributed linoprints of jackdaws, otters, and many of the other wonderful animals and landmarks I'd found on my walks in the countryside.
This hare she cut from lino for 2019's Ring The Hill was especially popular with readers.
During the writing of Ring The Hill, I made the observation to my mum that all pheasants run like they are frantically saying "Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit" to themselves. I also sent her a photograph of Clarence, the friendly pheasant who was regularly visiting my garden at the time. A few days later she sent me this linoprint.
My landlady countered by claiming the pheasant was in fact called Lawrence, which was one of the most fucking deranged comments I've ever heard. Anyone could see, even from half a mile away, that he was a Clarence.
Not long afterwards, I talked to my mum about the owls that used to live near another house I'd lived in, and how they seemed to hoot in response to the whistle of the steam train on the heritage railway at the bottom of the valley, as if believing it to be their commanding unseen Owl God. She soon sent me this...
My mum also illustrated the inside of my first short story collection Help The Witch, my 2021 non-fiction book Notebook and my debut novel Villager. Excitement would always build as I waited to see what she would come up with. Watching her art develop became an extra motivating factor for me in trying to improve as a writer. Neither of us are particularly competitive people and tend to want to hide in cupboards when people compliment our work, but we also have a certain self-punishing perfectionism in common, and I felt, during this period, that we were quietly raising one another's game and a psychic connection was developing in our working relationship.
This connection arguably reached its apogee in 2024 when I was wondering if my mum might be able to contribute an illustration to my third novel, Everything Will Swallow You. I had an image in my head of a quintessentially conical Dorset hill, with a wig of trees on top of it, possibly with a Paganish sun over it. I hadn't even mentioned this idea to her yet, nor given her my first draft of the book to read, and on a visit to my parents' house in Nottinghamshire that autumn I found this already drying in her work room...
Everything Will Swallow You came out in paperback yesterday and I signed 1000 copies of it on Wednesday in the Blackwell's warehouse, though at this stage I can't even bring myself to ask anyone else to buy it, because I'm so tired of being my own reluctant marketing manager, so desperate to shut the fuck up and write. In the run-up to the book's publication there have been echoes, for me, of the struggle and redemption of 2012-2013: the feeling that your livelihood might be being taken away from you (in this case with last year's collapse of my ex-publishers, Unbound) and then an enormous creative push, via digital means, which sidesteps the gatekeepers, says up yours to the naysayers and gets your work directly to the people who want to read it. I'd thought - and hoped - I wouldn't need social media any more but gaining a flood of new readers through the writing I've put on Bluesky has helped this book get out there, though not, I suspect, quite enough to edge onto the bestseller list.
"Am I really just back where I was 13 years ago, but selling fewer books? " I could ask myself. But that would be a deranged kind of measuring. The measuring of art is not mathematical. You only have to look at my mum's work to realise that. She doesn't sell her prints for a lot of money (my ex-publishers didn't even pay her for her work and, though I believe they should have, to be fair she never actually asked them to). She's not famous and has so little interest in being known to anyone that this newsletter in itself will probably make her cringe a bit. She's not "shifting units". But her improvement has been immense. There's no argument to be made against that. I, on the other hand, have gone in that same 13-year period from being a half-fledged non-fiction writer with a sometimes not particularly aesthetically attractive backlist who was frustrated at not being able to write the fiction he dreamed about writing to being the author of three novels and two collections of short stories. I've also now got books I can feel proud of from cover to cover, because of the commitment I've made to not compromising to please other people, and because of the illustrations that compliment my books: not just my mum's, but the wonderful covers Joe McLaren has done for my fiction, and the sketches my dad did for Notebook.
Authors aren't supposed to call writing "art". We worry it might make us sound pretentious. But we should be brave enough to call it that. In the era of the deeply evil and damaging word "content", it's even more important that we find that bravery. Because art is what it is, and what it should be. Working with actual artists - seeing how much they get out of creating for the pure pleasure of it - helps remind you of that.
It's all got to be about the process. Because, otherwise, what's the point?
I wrote in a little bit more depth about my parents' art here.
You can find my mum's Etsy page here.
