Yesterday both Karen and I had music gigs at the East Oxford Farmers’ Market. However, she didn’t draw a cartoon of my early music band performing. The character on the small table is Pink Fluffy Monster (friends call him PFM.)
The Albion Beatnik Bookstore (the world’s finest bookshop) yesterday launched two new publications under its own imprint: issue 2 of its occasional magazine The Sandspout; and Baret Magarian’s novella Mirror and Silhouette.
In addition to a lot of top-quality writing, The Sandspout is especially notable for the quality of three illustrations, on pages 51, 54 and 103 by invisibules.org (alone worth the cover price of £3.00.) Take note, because the editor didn’t include them in the index.
He did, however, add a scandalous bio on p51: “Andrew Kay is a mathematician and research engineer: he is actually paid to think about welding Kit Kats to motherboards. His drawing took flight when his vanity on-line comic strip (he studied with Adam Murphy) featuring invisible characters was running out of I-can’t-see-you type gags. He leads bodybuilding workshops, likes hairdressing, plays early music with his recorder – though he himself is always late (his Skeleton Crew early music consort kindly call it syncopation); he once broke his recorder on-stage at the Isle of Wight.”
I’m afraid this is what came out of my brain today, whilst on the train back to Oxford after a day in London. I went for a meeting which finished an hour before the National Gallery closed. At the gallery I was inspired by a striking image of St. Michael slaughtering a devil, painted in 1468 by Bartolomé Bermejo:
I mean — Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those eyes?
I went to see Karen performing as part of a celebration called “Where’s the Art?” for an organisation known as CARU (Contemporary Arts Research Unit.) I didn’t intend to draw her as the largest person on the page, honestly.
Another trip to Whipsnade Zoo. As well as being surprised by a one-day-old baby elephant (born a couple of weeks earlier than expected) we also saw a brown bear having a delicious cooling roll in the grass.
Not just another jazz gig, but Karen’s first proper Jazz Gig at the Half Moon pub in Oxford last night. If you weren’t hip enough to be there, I’m sorry. Peel me a grape, as Dave Frishberg wrote. The gold glittery shoes had to be seen to be believed. Thanks to Trish Elphinstone, Martin Pickett, Tim Richardson and Ng Shu-Ting Esther for helping Karen to make the occasion so musical.
Two posts in one weekend! We were present at a short (free) concert by Nostos, the choir of the Oxford University Greek Society in the basement of Blackwells bookshop, amongst the philosophies of mind and science. I had a go at sketching the whole choir, but I missed the musical director (she never stopped moving) and the choir kept shuffling, so it was hard to tell who else I missed. After the music we ate pastries on a bench in the sunshine, and then took a cruise along the river to Iffley lock.
Another evening of music, this time the Jazz Jam at Oxford Jazz Kitchen. It was very crowded, so from the back I had a restricted view and had to make up quite a lot to fill the scene. It’s still fairly accurate, I reckon. Karen got up and performed the saucy “Kitchen Man” to an enthusiastically fast drum-beat, but managed to keep her cool and stay in the groove.
Great performance by Pete Oxley and Nick Meier last night at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore. I prepped my coloured pencils and riffed along with the fluid melodies and oh so tight rapport. I managed to include references to almost every title played, except for Vera Cruz (because I didn’t know what to draw).
Today Karen and I participated in an event in our local museum of the history of science. We drew pictures of insects seen through a microscope, and then transferred our drawings into monoprint. That’s my* body louse, Pediculus humanus, reproduced above – I forgot to reverse the caption. The event was designed to celebrate the famous work Micrographia, by Robert Hooke.
UPDATE: Got some paint and had a go at home today. This isn’t a print, this is the back-lit acetate block I used to hold the paint after making a print (so it’s a kind of negative). 
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* only borrowed. I wasn’t allowed to keep her.