Guest - John Hegley

Today we had a guest speak come in: John Hegley... and his small guitar "Steve", a very good way to start an introduction I felt.

dialogue.firstdirect.com - John Hegley

Scan of my sketch book, including doodles of Hegley

The talk considered not so much of talking, but more of several humorous songs of John Hegely singing about his childhood and telling us about his poetry. A great entertainer, his songs/poems were great fun, including singalongs and a rousing performance of the guilamot by Salvator, a guest lecturer we had in our second year.

Scan from a handout given to us by John Hegely (it is unclear whether he drew this himself, or it is the product of a previous guest talk)

Left side, copied from John Hegely Handout, Right side notes written by myself

We were asked by John Hegely to draw a quick sketch based on a line from one of his poems (part of which is shown above). I remember drawing a car surfing, unfortunately I did not get this image back. Which is a shame because I enjoyed the idea of drawing a surfing car as part of my university project. Ah the silly things we do in Illustration.

Poster by John Hegely, handed out to us on the day (origin unknown)

The second part of the assignment was to produce some sort of poster for an upcoming book by John. Which I did not do, as another option was to draw a second image to go with his poetry. I remember drawing a flying car with wings... ah I enjoy quirky projects like this.

On the whole the talk was very entertaining and certainly interesting to experience the wonderful eccentric character that is John Hegely, it was honestly the first time I have ever had a guest speaker who spent most of his time singing strange songs. I did pick up on some points from Hegely, one is to try and explore your work from new angles (for example try turning a drawing into a short text... or in the literal sense, though the idea of me looking at a piece of writing upside down strikes me as slightly pointless). Another  point was to always try maintaining an element of humour in your work, something I try to do in most of my work, for example I created a humerous webcomic for the first and second year (see below)

 my webcomic at drunkduck.com/not_faust

The finally point was to always seek as much input from as many different people as possible, though I have learned that showing work to mates is not always good.. especially if they tend to be more on the bastard side. All these points I did not really find relevant for the FMP... more for sort of work in general. Then again I suppose there might be a message there of making sure that the tutors see your work regularly for the FMP.