A Little Night Music

My latest illustration - a bombastic baroque bat band!

My Camino

Camino Frances, August 2014 from Benjamin V on Vimeo.

Almost two years ago to the day I indulged my itchy feet and set off to trek across Spain, following the well-trodden pilgrim route to Santiago. During this trip I tested the patience of everyone I met with endless video making, and have finally got round to putting together a short film compilation! Many thanks goes to all who I shared this journey with, without whom this would not have been possible.

Pilgrim Procession

I spent the summer of 2014 following yellow arrows for over five hundred miles across the north of Spain, on a route known as 'El Camino de Santiago'. Every year this ancient pilgrim path is traversed by countless individuals from all walks of life, making up a colourful and ever-shifting nomadic community. Pilgrims are motivated by various spiritual and recreational inclinations as they walk, both alone and together, towards places unknown.

Twenty Five

Year Twenty Five from Benjamin V on Vimeo.

This video is the result of a year-long period of rather obsessive documentation. It is a sort of montage of my year - using one second of footage from every day - starting with my 25th birthday.

I hoped that by committing to such a project I might be more likely to make the most of each day, in spite of a lot of directionlessness and a less than ideal overall situation. And much of the time I felt that the filmmaking process did indeed inspirit more active participation in the unfolding of my life, allowing me to be genuinely more engaged with and appreciaitive of where I was and what I was doing. At other times though it felt like something of a barrier between myself and my experience - introducing an element of affectation and artificiality to the unfolding of events.

All in all I think documentation of this kind is a fun and worthwhile part of living, just as long as we're careful not to let it become the point of living itself!

Sincere thank yous are extended to everyone who I knew and shared some of my twenty fifth year with, for making the year what it was and for helping to put this together. Thanks to everyone who contributed a bit of videography, and especially to those who put up so well with having my camera endlessly in their face for a whole year!

Goats, goats, goats!

 

How many goats does this unusually-shaped tree contain? The answer might be closer than you think...

Morocco Moments

Sahara Retreat 2014 from Benjamin V on Vimeo.

Just a small video I made, comprised of a collection of moments from the retreat I attended in the Moroccan Sahara last month.

Birthday Menagerie

Jaunt of the Penguins

Penguins are known for their tendency to undertake great and perilous journeys, covering vast overland distances in search of breeding grounds, fresh seafood, and, no doubt, adventure. Less well-publicised however are the intervals between these pilgrimages, when penguin life takes on a more low-key, comfortable, pedestrian pace.

But with comfort comes predictability and tedium, and these pastoral penguins may find that the fortitude and grit that serve them so well on the road may be equally called upon amidst this more ordinary existence.

Southeast Asia trip

Trip Montage from Benjamin V on Vimeo.

A little video/photo montage of my recent 5 month trip around Southeast Asia.

Daily artwork!

Wilfred and Friends

Some character artworks I did, for a prospective farm-themed children's book/clothing project; collaboration with Emily Bolter.

Seal sanctuary

Concluding my very delayed featuring of 3rd year uni work...

This was inspired by an outing to the National Seal Sanctuary at Gweek, where there were broken seals aplenty. The artwork was also used in the Falmouth Book of Quotes & Sayings 2011, to illustrate a quote by Charles Dickens:

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

Book jackets

Here follows a couple of book jacket illustrations I did during my final year as a student at Falmouth, using colour reduction linocut printing.

I enjoyed the printing and cutting process, although sometimes it was slightly exhausting. By the end of the project even my blisters had blisters!

I did have some trouble with the latter illustration (for Andy Merrifield's The Wisdom of Donkeys) in that I was perhaps a bit ambitious in the number of colours (and hence layers) it involved. In the end I was able to achieve the above artwork by printing each colour layer onto separate white paper, and then combining them using the miracles of computer technology.

I feel that this year's sporadic foray into the realms of lino printmaking has been an interesting and worthwhile thing, especially since publishers and art directors who reviewed my portfolio in New York mostly responded better to this "more sophisticated" style of work than my painterly children's illustration.

The Pelican Chorus

Some illustrations for 'The Pelican Chorus' by Edward Lear: a heartwarming tale of matrimony between wetland Royalty, and the empty-nest syndrome felt by the parents of the pelican bride.

Different Seasons

 "I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.

Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower...

"I don’t know how long I sat there on the rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.

My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement. I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes weren’t brown, but a dark, dusty black – the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity... What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.

"It was on the tip of my tongue to tell the others about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself... I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life... I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail...

 

"The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them - words shrinks things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out." 

- Stephen King, The Body

The Big Lunch

Year 3, project one: an editorial illustration for a Sunday Times magazine about The Big Lunch.

Below is what it might look like if I was paid to do this, instead of just pretending for my school work.

End of Year Two

To celebrate the end of second year, I made some book covers.

The three books that I chose are not part of a series, but appeal to similar audiences, and handle quite serious themes in a similar way. This time I dropped the watercolours in favour of printing (with woodcut), to try out a more graphic approach. These novels also all deal with polar opposites (life/death, religion/science, faith/doubt, heaven/earth, etc.) so black and white imagery seemed fitting.

In Terry Pratchett's Nation, a boy called Mau returns to his home island (the Nation) to discover that his whole village has been wiped out by a tsunami. As the only surviving member of the island, Mau is tasked with forging a new nation from the broken pieces, with grief for his loved ones and his shaken faith in the gods weighing on his mind.
 

In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, 14 year-old Susie Salmon is raped and murdered in the opening chapter. The book deals with the lives and relationships of Susie's family and friends - and her killer - in the days, months and years after her death, with Susie watching over them from her own personal heaven.

 

Early in the book Susie remembers seeing a penguin in a snow globe when she was very young, and being worried for him. Her father reassures her that he is "trapped in a perfect world." Following her death Susie narrates the novel from much the same position - trapped in a world that is superficially perfect (i.e. heaven). She can no longer be harmed by anything in the real world, but can also no longer interact with any of her loved ones on earth. While everyone outside the 'globe' changes and grows, Susie remains an observer.

Ian McEwan's Enduring Love is a "pyschological thriller" about a middle-aged scientific journalist named Joe Rose, whose comfortable life and long-term relationship become threatened when a ballooning accident brings a delusional stranger called Jed into his life. After a passing glance between them Jed instantly falls in love with Joe, and his obsessive stalking tests the limits of Joe's rational mind.

This is the cover I had most trouble with. I was happy with my concept, but found the execution difficult. Turns out it's not that easy making a rose petal turn into a hot air balloon with woodcut printing!

Last Supper at Woodlane

Something fun I did in first year.

From left to right: Bartholomew (Keyrn Roach), James Minor (Linda Scott), Andrew (Gary Long), Judas Iscariot (Nigel Owen), Peter (Mary Mabbutt), John (Sue Clarke), Jesus (Alan Male), Thomas (Mike Venning), James Major (Rachel Dunn), Philip (Mark Foreman), Matthew (yours truly), and Thaddeus and Simon (unnamed canteen ladies).

Cameron Eyes the Prize...

Recently it was that time of the decade again - when people all over the country get very excited and start formulating opinions, because we have a chance to vote for who gets evicted from Number 10, or something like that.

I decided it would be a good time to do an editorial project. It was supposed to be a way of exercising my conceptual thinking skills, although I just ended up drawing politcians' heads on animals as usual. The meat was supposed to be Britain, but I don't know how well that comes across. All in all however, it gave me a good excuse to stay up on Thursday night listening to David Dimbleby.

I also did this (don't ask):

Standing Tall

Not very long ago I wrote and illustrated a children's story. It's about a dog, a goat and a goose, who meet up and are united by a common goal. If I had to shoehorn it into a genre, it'd be a rhyming-comedy-thriller, of sorts.