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There's been a lot of interest in the purchasing of my remaining bits of artwork, so much so that I've been unable to respond to many of the inquiries. Consequently I've agreed with Joseph Melchior, who I've known for more years than I can remember, for him to become my agent. He's an artwork collector himself and knows many of the people enquiring about my artwork. So, from now on, please address all artwork enquiries to josephmelchior@yahoo.com
Thanks. |
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I've had quite a number of requests to do email interviews. I'm very grateful for your interest but I'm becoming increasingly unable to do interviews. I agreed to two recently (you know who you are gentlemen!) The questions are usually very much the same but not so completely the same that I can have answers on file. Some questions like: "What was it like working at 2000 AD?", "What was it like working with Alan Moore?", "How do things differ today?", "where do you think things are going in the future?" etc. require long and complicated answers. Replying to these interviews is surprisingly time consuming and I do them when I should be drawing. (I'll post the two recent ones somewhere on this site.) Many of the commonly asked questions have been comprehensively answered by me in The Art Of Brian Bolland. Get yourself a copy! So, I'm sorry but, unless you catch me at a quiet time I very probably won't be able to do your interview.
Apologies and thanks for your understanding. |
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Erró |
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added to website: 18 May 2010 |
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The Icelandic artist Erró, now based in France, has an exhibition of his work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. On sale in the gift shop is his large copy of my Tank Girl Odyssey cover from 1995, with minor modifications: The addition of background figures from Maoist Social Realism and the deletion of my signature which was originally running down the left-hand side of the TV. |
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This is my open letter to Erró.
Dear Erró (or Mr. Gudmundur if you prefer.)
My name will mean very little to you unless you remember deleting it from your version of my “Tank Girl Odyssey” cover from 1995.
I first saw your work in a gallery in Reykjavik. I was impressed by the wild exuberance of it while enjoying spotting the artists you’d swiped, most of whose names I knew.
I was at the Pompidou Centre in Paris recently and I walked onto the floor showing your work and there, featuring prominently in the window of the gift shop, was a large poster of MY “Tank Girl” signed by you and on sale for 600 Eu. It consisted of a badly copied version of my work and, where the original logo had been, a group of figures presumably taken from Maoist Social Realism. My wife Rachel was with me. She’d worked with me on the original artwork. She painted Booga (that’s the kangaroo!) She said out loud what I was thinking: “That’s just NOT RIGHT!”
I spent five years in British art schools and I’m pretty liberal minded about the fine art world. I respect collage as a medium - from Max Ernst on. Warhol’s soup cans. Lichtenstein’s huge copies of Russ Heath and Jack Kirby’s work. I found your earlier work with its radical juxtapositions very amusing, the sheer mass of detail created an almost migraine inducing new whole. Collage is all about the juxtaposition of incongruous elements. Where the number of elements you’re collaging becomes so few and one of those elements is the thing that attracts the eye the whole experience is no longer about the juxtaposition. The element dominating your “Tank Girl” print is my Tank Girl cover. You look at Tank Girl and Booga first and then at your additional figures. It is they (and my efforts) that are attracting your eye when you see the poster for sale in the gift shop.
I was interested to see that you’d copied almost every detail from my original Tank Girl cover but with a couple of telling exceptions. My original was itself part collage. You may not know this but the pillow on the right (which you did include) has on it my copy of the cover of the first LP by the American band Ween. “God, Ween, Satan, the Oneness”. The butt of the rifle had on it some photos that were stuck onto the artwork. You’d left those out. Most significantly you’d removed my name which was running along the left-hand side of the TV.
I have in front of me your reply to fellow artist Chris Weston’s email to you. You consider yourself “a kind of columnist or reporter”. Reporters quote their sources all the time in order to get at a greater understanding of events. Their reports, like your work, are made up almost entirely of quotes. The difference between reporters and you, Erró, is that they name the source of their quotes and an honest reporter would be careful not to misrepresent his sources or take their quotes out of context. If he did he’d be deliberately setting out to discredit them. In your “Tank Girl” print you “quote” a whole piece of work by me. At a particular moment you consciously deleted my name - the artist’s name. In so doing you are claiming that this wasn’t done by an artist - it wasn’t done by anybody in fact - therefore it’s not “art” it’s just “stuff”. Just raw material for your “Synthesising” process. There’s something particularly furtive and grubby about the moment when you removed the artist’s name, when you thought no one was looking, from a whole piece of his work. It’s the moment when you admitted that you knew you were taking his work, discarding him, and selling it as your own.
You compare yourself to Rubens? he was surrounded by “an incredible number of assistants”? Well I’m delighted that you consider me to be one of your assistants, albeit one of your unnamed, unpaid and unwitting assistants. I have a feeling Rubens’ assistants would have known they were his assistants and consented to be his assistants and he would have paid them.
What this is is a kind of colonialism. You, Erró, have found a place for yourself in the land of the Fine Art Elite, in “Gallery-land”, and you have gone out and discovered a dark continent inhabited by pygmies - barely more than savages really - people with a colourful but primitive culture. Like the Victorian explorers you find what they do ghastly but somehow alluring so you steal from them, give them nothing in return and dismiss them. You display bits of their infantile and garish nonsense in what you call a “synthesis” on a gallery wall in the civilised world, something which has nothing whatsoever to do with giving a full and accurate “report” on the stuff you steal or the people you steal it from. It’s more to do with the titillation of your peers. You’d like them to be shocked by the vulgarity of the artefacts you’re bringing back from whatever nasty place you’ve been to but appreciate them (and you, of course) in that post-modern kind of way. One reviewer of your work said “I don’t know where Erró finds all that stuff”. Luckily for you she and other inhabitants of the galleries don’t know the names of the people you steal from and you’re not in a hurry to list them. You’re exploiting people like me, not because you’re a “witness to our time” but because you want to turn the base metal of comics into art gold - and you’d like to have a lucrative career in Gallery-land.
Back in the early ‘70s, when I started doing what I do, comic artists were treated pretty badly. They had to turn out many pages very quickly and had to accept whatever terms their publishers dictated. They signed away any right to be repaid if their work was used again. Their artwork was not returned and they were not allowed to sign their name or have their readers know who they were. In 1977, for the first time, we were given credits. The names of the writers and artists were listed on the title pages. I and a huge population of people who know about comics, BD, manga or whatever you’d like to call it, know the names of the artists. All of them work hard. Many of them are technically brilliant and/or display a unique form of self expression. They are Artists in every sense. Artists in my field have achieved a high degree of control over what their work looks like, how and where it’s printed and published. I, personally, don’t like another person to ink over my pencils or colour my work. I’m a control freak! So, in the light of all this, it’s particularly infuriating for me to see an image I created coloured and inked in a line that is not mine, with my name removed, in a place that is not of my choosing, signed by someone else - and that’s all before we get onto to the matter of the 600 Eu price tag. We're used to being shafted by publishers - but by a fellow artist?
I always did my work with a clear conscience. It pleases me (and it seems ideologically sound to me) that if anyone wanted to see my work they could do so for the price of $1 - or at least at a price they could afford. I could never be comfortable with the idea of producing a piece of art merely to sell it to one wealthy person who then had the exclusive right to view it. My only reason for working - and the thing that gives me as much pleasure as being paid for it - is when the work is printed and distributed and the printed version is in my hands. I know that I and anyone else who wants to see my work is holding the very same thing. “Gallery-land” is not for me.
So - Let me sum up. I’ve very much liked your earlier collages. The many elements have created a new whole, but I think your “Tank Girl” print is not about Erró’s choice of image juxtaposition. It’s dominated by my work. I think the selling point of your poster is my work. The way that promotional photo of you with the “Tank Girl” poster behind you is cropped proves the point. You’ve moved well away from “fair use” into plagiarism. By removing my name from the image you show you don’t really care about the artists whose work you steal. Your work sneers at and perpetuates old stereotypes about the kind of work done by me and people I respect - and does it no good whatsoever. Your work is about “Recontextualizing”. ie. taking something out of one place and putting it somewhere else, thereby showing it in a different (possibly ironic) light. In view of the fact that your poster of my Tank Girl is selling for 600 Eu I suggest you stop selling it and I invite you to recontextualize the money you got from the sale of it out of your bank account into mine.
Yours sincerely
Brian Bolland
If anybody would like to bombard Erró with emails on this subject. Hopefully well reasoned and not abusive emails they can do so at this address.
editionsjboulan@wanadoo.fr
or
anne.anthony.75@gmail.com
I just got this email from Erró’s agent so no further action is necessary:
Sir
Following your email, we have decided to no longer sell this edition “Tank”. We have made 20 copies, we sold three copies, we have given 5 copies to Mr. ERRO.
We'll give him the 12 remaining copies.
Sincerely,
Jacques Boulan
And also:
Hello
We have received your mail. We immediately sent to Mr ERRO who has promised to do the needful (necessary thing).
Sincerely, |
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The Actress & the Bishop |
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added to website: 01 July 2009 |
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Lee Ling Toh |
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added to website: 01 May 2009 |
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I left school in 1969 at the age of 18 and went to Leicester Polytechnic to do a pre-diploma art course. There I met Lee Ling Toh. Lee Ling was from Penang, Malaysia. She was doing her art course in Leicester and then she was going to marry Kok King Cheung who was a dentist in Canada. I've always wanted to get back in touch with Lee Ling and see how life has panned out for her. If you are Lee Ling or Lee Ling's child or grandchild please get in touch. |
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Carol Day |
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added to website: 16 April 2009 |
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Carol Day was (and still is) one of my all time favorite newspaper strips. I clipped it out of the Daily Mail every day when I was 13 in 1964. I'm glad to say that David Wright's superb work is available to see on the Carol Day website at http://www.carol-day.com/index.html
If you like it please leave a comment. Roger Clark has spent hundreds of hours putting it all together using David Wright's original scrapbooks - and, in some cases, the original artwork - and would appreciate the feedback. |
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Dredd artwork |
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added to website: 06 February 2009 |
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People have always wondered which pages of artwork I still have here at home. It may take a while but, bit by bit, I'll endeavour to get all of it scanned in and posted in this section. I'm beginning to think of selling some of it - not all - so if you're interested get in touch. It won't be cheap because, since I gave up up producing real artwork 10 years ago these pages are very rare. |
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Camelot 3000 |
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added to website: 21 November 2008 |
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This is a recent cover for a new de luxe collection of the original Camelot 3000 series, now 25 years old! Previous trade paperbacks of Camelot haven't included my original 12 covers for that series - but this time round they're inserted as chapter pages. There's also a lot of my pencils and prelim pages and just about every bit of artwork I produced - along with a lengthy and interesting introduction from Mike Barr. If you want to see the interior artwork at its absolute best though, (minus my covers), you need to get yourself the Spanish edition published in Barcelona by Planeta DeAgostini. |
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A book about Burma |
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added to website: 14 May 2008 |
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I'm working on a book about a week I spent in Burma in 1988. It's in its very early stages at the moment. |
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