dan clowes and chris ware

dan clowes and chris ware are coming to town. see you there.

nothing much and carrot cake

view of the drawing room at 59 seymour street

by matilda sharpe (1850)

i have been trying to spend my sundays working on my comics at the geffrye museum in their restaurant overlooking the garden. the geffrye is a museum inexplicably but wonderfully dedicated to english domestic interiors and every time i walk through its corridors i have to stop for a moment to look at the above watercolour by matilda sharpe dated 1850. it is small, measuring only 13x15cm, and the scene is just of what i assume to be the drawing room she used daily, but she decided it was important enough to paint it.


after i finished art school but before i got into comics for a short time i was fed up with art. instead of creating video or performance pieces like i had done in school i just did what seemed most obvious and what i had done as a teenager: make small watercolour and pencil drawings of my most immediate surroundings.


they are far from matilda sharpe's little work of wonder, but they are little mementos of time spent by myself doing nothing much.

should you ever venture into the geffrye then make sure to try their carrot cake, laden with cream cheese frosting, basking in the absence of raisins and served by london's friendliest waiting staff it nourishes like nothing else.