Illustration is not a Team Sport.

Working alone or together?

Ah, the peace and solace of your own company. Lovely, isn’t it? ISN’T IT??

To be honest, it’s not for everyone. I spoke to a friend of mine recently who genuinely couldn’t remember the last time he had been alone, and was honest enough to admit that the thought of it was slightly terrifying. For me, the opposite is true. But also, I’m not a recluse.

We’ve started a bit heavy today, haven’t we? Let’s begin again. Illustration is rarely a team sport, at least, not the way I tend to play it. A lot of clients talk a good game at the start, about how they want the project to ‘fully collaborative’ and ‘we want YOU to tell US what it looks like’, but it very quickly becomes, ‘No, no…we didn’t mean like that…’ and everyone remembers the hierarchy that’s in place and that you’ve been hired to do some work.

Of course, you do get great clients and, in those instances, you get to produce lovely work, but they are still not ‘co-workers’. I used to have co-workers, back when I was in the architectural profession, and despite the difficulties and frustrations of teamworking, I do miss the feeling of having pulled off something together that would not have been possible as an individual. It’s a genuine bonding experience. Going for a pint at the end of the week, having achieved what felt seemingly impossible on Monday morning, is a hard feeling to replicate when you spend your day drawing alone. At the end of a project, I put the lid on my pen, send over the finals, and close the laptop. And then there I am, sat at my desk, thinking, ‘Well, I guess that’s that then.’

There is not a huge amount to be done about this, I’m very much aware that I chose this way of working because I want to have complete creative control, or as much as is possible. Even my graphic novel work, a field this is frequently a collaborative union of writer and illustrator, I of course, want to do both. But it is a conflict. I was talking to a really great and established illustrator recently who was genuinely considering jacking it in because he was bored of working alone. It’s an interesting point. If you’re working in complete isolation, is your work somewhat pointless? Drawings seldom (if ever), change the world, but human connections and interactions ARE the world.

My partner, Lizzy Stewart (yes, she’s an illustrator too - unbearable, isn’t it?), will often reply to people considering an illustration career, by asking something to the effect of, ‘Do you enjoy your own company?’ It’s a simple question, and it seems irrelevant at first, but if you don’t, then it might well be a non-starter of a lifestyle for you.

I find that I engineer social interaction to balance its absence in my work life. I am frequently harassing friends for a coffee or a pint, and it’s always nice, especially if you’re both going through a similar creative challenge, but again, it doesn’t quite do the same job as collaboration.

One of my solutions to this paradox, is pétanque. That’s right, French boule. I started playing with an old friend in lockdown, and in a relatively short space of time it became one of my favourite things to do. There’s lots of reasons to love pétanque, and I’m not going to bore you all with them now (maybe later…?), but I think the thing I enjoy most, is playing as a team.

It was fun playing against my friend, but as we got a little better, it has become so much more fun playing together against others. As I was never much of team sports kind of guy, this came as a bit of a surprise to me, but all the post match analysis, the tactics, the camaraderie, it all feels like true collaboration. And I know how ridiculous that sounds, that pétanque is ‘just a game’, and that is true, but so is illustration. Both are just a mechanism to feel something, and if you don’t get all the feelings you need from one source, its okay to get it from somewhere else. In fact, it’s probably more sensible to hedge bet rather than put all your eggs in one basket.

I am not a recluse. I love working as an illustrator and I love playing pétanque. The interesting revelation to me is that both help me enjoy the other all the more. I’m also aware I’m being very binary in this example, my life is not JUST drawing and pétanque, but it’s about recognising the different roles things have in my life.

Achieving a perfect balance is easy to say, but very hard (if not impossible) to achieve, so take it easy, and see what you can do along the way. I spend my days in a kiosk, but that would be insanity if you good people didn’t drop in from time to time. That said, I’m pretty sure you’ve wandered off now, and that’s fair enough (the mad bloke in the box won’t shut up about boule), but I’ll see you all next time.

Covers.

Couple of international covers recently. One for The Affairs, a Taiwanese newspaper, which also featured a selection of my work and an interview inside. And POST, a French, architectural magazine by the AREP Group.

The Robinson Trilogy.

I watched the Robinson Trilogy recently, London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins. Shot many years apart, the three films by Patrick Keiller document a fictitious character (Robinson) as he traverses a very real Britain. They are not about one thing, but more of a psychogeographical ramble through a landscape of art, industry and politics. It might seem a little dry from the outside, but I found them surprisingly emotional and also humorous. It won’t be for everyone, but it really struck a chord with me, so perhaps you might enjoy it too.

The Box.

The image at the top of the newsletter is a cabin designed by Ralph Erskine in the early forties in Sweden, and known as ‘The Box’. I think it’s a really beautiful piece of architecture and it has been made as a limited edition print by Dark City Gallery as part of a series we’ve been doing. They’ve also found a few unsold spares from some of my previous runs, but they do tend to go quite quickly, so well worth checking out if that’s of interest.

The Hard Switch.

Finally, a huge thank you to everyone who backed my new book on Kickstarter. It’s all over now, but it’s been really mad ride, and the response was so much more than I could have possibly imagined. Again, THANK YOU.

I also know it can be annoying if a creator is banging on about something you’re not that interested in, so for those people, thanks for bearing with me. And if you ARE interested but missed out somehow, the book will be out in the shops in October (2023), and is currently up or pre-order from the publisher, Avery Hill.

Here’s a page I quite like.

That’s it for now. Enjoy your day, and feel free to use the pétanque area next to the kiosk. It’s a good spot here, isn’t it?

Owen D. Pomery.