comics are my first love learn to read
with comments it's a very intimate
experience in as much as it has this
rich visual language that sort of goes
straight in like music really I don't
think in terms of single images and so I
love film and I love music and I love
these other things but for some reason I
keep coming back to comics because it
seems to make good use of the stuff I do
my new book is called black dog the
dreams of Paul Nash Paul Nash was one of
a group of war artists he was a washed
in both wars but he found his voice in
the First World War and he went into the
war as a rather sort of wishy-washy
romantic symbolist and then he went into
the trenches and it completely changed
him he rose to the challenge really of
expressing this hell that he was going
through they became a sort of moral
imperative to make images that did right
by this at first glance he looks like a
landscape painter but none of them are
they're all psychological spaces but
they're sort of dreamscapes really so I
thought rather than just do straight
biography this dream place seemed to be
what somewhere I could meet him really
so it became an imagined response to
Paul Nash it's not strictly biographical
it's not just taking you through his war
experience it's trying to take you
inside his head
I now live in Rye which is where Paul
Nash lived after the war so I feel some
sort of connection with the landscapes
that you know I just know his landscapes
very well I find all sorts out here I
mean there's dead animals and various
things that show up bury them in the
bones rock down we find I mean the birds
themselves are inspiring dropping
feathers everywhere and just being
themselves and use everything here
really literally physically as collage
and imaginatively even though I'm not
really consciously aware of it it just
seeps in it wallpapers my head
had a loose loose structure of important
moments in Nash's life and I knew it
could have a dream logic to it so I
could hop around and then filled my
notebook here with page ideas layout
ideas that could possibly work and then
with each scene it was a case of trying
to work out the sort of emotional
density of it what's the best tone of
voice to express this particular moment
so some of them are drawn some of them
are painted some of them are very
stylized this is a sequence where Nash
heads out into this fantastical forest
he's reaching out trying to touch this
kingfishers egg he spent half a page of
his sort of ography writing about his
kingfishers egg that he found and the
fragility of it and the fact that it's
it has this sort of luminescent glow and
it's tiny tiny thin calcium shell and
how can this tiny little fragile blue
egg exist in the same world as the wall
I think the idea of repeating the hands
and having so many pushing through this
is so that he becomes almost like the
jungle
but also it's a sense of sort of
overlapping time and time falling apart
and fragmenting I think if you had to
write this if I was if I was a
scriptwriter I don't think it would end
up being such a visual echoing having
this form but I think it's by trying
things in different ways by sketching it
and then slowly out of that the correct
tone of voice you evolves naturally and
so and then now I look at it and think
and of course I couldn't have really had
done this any other way
I think most of the stories that I'm
interested in take place here and that's
why a lot of the work that I do ends up
using fantastical images or imaginative
images dreamlike images because I think
that's where our minds you know create
our own narratives really and try and
make sense of it all
that's endlessly fascinating for me and
that's that's basically what my stories
are about