Guest Speaker: John Hegley

John Hegley came in today for a lecture and workshop. He is a poet, comedian, musician and song writer and was introduced as such; 'so someone who doesn't draw'. He began by showing us his drawings.


Before the talk
I had had a look online for any of his poetry and must admit I didn't quite get them. They seemed like the sort of humour that was a little outdated or possibily a bit silly. However I don't really read poetry... at all. And I only looked at a handful of poems.

John's talk
I realised once the talk had begun that the best way to experience his poetry is to see him perform it himself, with rhythm and beat the poems have their humour laid out properly. I really enjoyed John's lecture. He was introduced as someone who didn't do illustration and this was an interesting opportunity to experience something from the other side of the table I guess; the person who creates the subject matter that we as illustrators use. But then he got up to talk and the first thing he said was that he was going to show us his drawings!

He showed a few pictures, pen drawings of things from his childhood and sang a song about his family using a picture of his living room as a guide. The humour of his poetry and songs came from his live performance and directly from him.

John spoke about his workshops with children and he had asked a group to add things to this particular drawing. He spoke about how some of the additions had inspired ideas for other poems of his. He also used participation and drawing in his live performances, which is what he did with us in the afternoon.

He read us one of his newer poems (and made us all sing a bit too!) and then got us to draw from it. The song contained a lot of surreal situations, references to history and popular culture and began and was addressed to his brother, so their was a personal history as well.

We ended up only having about 2 hours to do drawings to everyones was quite sketchy. I didn't really have any witty or clever ideas from the text and so just drew parts of it that I liked, seeing as I could just have fun with it. I ended up drawing Joan of Arc's dog; Johan Sebastian who has a small part to play in the middle of the poem. I wanted to draw the Dalek with ears but there was already a doodle of that on the page that was given to us and I didn't want to just end up recreating the image I had just seen. I thought drawing the dog would relate a bit more to my final major project as well.

These first 3 pages I just sketched various dogs, I didn't use a reference whilst doing these as it was a short amount of time and I was just generating ideas and doodling really. I have a dog and draw her frequently on walks. 

on the 4th page is a sketch that came from the beginning of the poem, this design on the wall sets off what I assumed to be a daydream or dream for the author and he gets into the boat and sails to the island in the distance. Again this was just a doodle trying to generate ideas. I found the text create quite literal imagery; there was a Roman on a deck chair, a dog running in the water and coming back with potatoes (?) and as I have said a Dalek with ears, and so I felt like that was imagery enough. 

Here's some life drawing of my dog and other dogs on a walk I drew last year for a project just to prove I'm not as terrible at drawing as drawings from this day make me look. :-/ 

The book cover on the right was handed out to us, I put it in my book without much thought but I like the style of text as it seemed fitting to the style of poetry and performance.

(all above imagery is my own, photocopy of book cover 'Peace, Love and Potatoes' given out by John Hegley)

The dog runs into the water and carries out potatoes which are called 'spuds' in the poem. I don't really know where I was going with this one. 

Reflection on the day

The day wasn't really about the drawing for me, it was more about hearing how ideas and inspirations can be taken from image as well as text and how the two aid each other. Even though the work at the end of the day wasn't so useful I did find John's talk really entertaining and interesting. I think the best thing I gained from it was what he had said about gaining inspiration. Ideas can be gained alternatively from text and image; if words aren't coming along easily drawing can help create what cannot be describe and vise versa. At the beginning of this final major project it is useful to think about, and through the coming weeks as I gain and develop ideas I can be open to let inspiration come from anywhere and everywhere.