Telephone Drawings

Ever since I can remember I’ve always had a pencil in my hand. I’m always drawing. I’ve got this sort of tick that makes me draw all the time, even if I’m not holding a pencil. I draw with my finger in the air or on a surface, even in my imagination. I can’t seem to switch off, like when you’ve been playing Tetris and you go to bed, and all you can see are falling blocks. Of all the drawing I “just do”, my favourites are what I call my “telephone drawings”—the doodles my hand does while I’m talking on the phone. All those piles of paper, which I have kept systematically for years now, are like a connection to the absurd, to the unanticipated, a sort of automatic handwriting that’s more connected to the world of dreams than to reality. The drawings that fill this exhibition were done while I was on the phone to friends, clients, my family, or you. While I was travelling, in hotels anywhere in the world, at home. They are the most secret part of my work; I’d never shown to them anyone before now. I love it when one of these unconscious drawings becomes the seed of a later illustration. It’s like your subconscious comes calling. I wonder whether I like to talk on the phone so much because deep down what I really like is being engrossed in scribbling on paper. More than once, in the middle of a “telephone drawing” session I’ve got so engrossed that I’ve lost the thread of the conversation and the person on the other end realised, and I had to make something up like “Oh, we got cut off for a moment there” or some such thing, which sometimes washes and sometimes doesn’t...