Sleeping a Sleep

Andy Luke has been a chum of mine for a number of years now. His comics were once described by Ralph Kidson as “like something a deranged serial killer would draw in his death row cell” which was aesthetically accurate even though Andy isn’t a deranged serial killer. Well, he’s not a serial killer anyway.

Anyway, he’s recently posted a few single panels on his Flickr account and I was most taken by the one above. This one’s also pretty keen.

This kind of art, most famously practiced by one David Shrigley, is very hard to describe because by most criteria it’s not “good art”, just little doodles done by someone who can’t draw “properly” which if you’re after clean, anatomically correct art that looks pretty is fine. But I find myself drawn to this sort of thing again and again and I can’t really describe why. In fact if I could describe why it’d probably ruin it – the mystery is what makes it work, or something.

So I think Andy Luke’s single panels should be printed in a big fat art book and sold for chunks of cash. And they should be blown up to poster size and displayed in galleries. That would be a good thing.