Black Roses by Simon Armitage

Black Roses is a poetic sequence written in the voice of Sophie Lancaster.

Twenty-year-old Sophie was attacked in a Lancashire park in 2007 and died several days later. The ferocity of the assault caused distress and outrage when reported by the international media and led to the creation of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity opposed to all forms of hatecrime and victimisation.

One-third of all profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Sophie Lancaster Foundation.

(Pomona Books 2012)

Surfing in Spring  - New York Times 

I've just produced this cover for the April/ May issue of the London Review of Books, you can see more about the issue here

The image is adapted from a series of Lithographs I made, based on views out of windows. This is the view from an upstairs bedroom at my parents house.

I really like the opening to Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, it's made me look at windows in a different way...

"...And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night I'd let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass." 

I have a series of Lithographic prints exhibited at the Pick Me Up event in Somerset house this week.

This print is a puddle on my way to work. It rained a lot this winter.

Below the picture is a series of shots of the process of printing these... There are 4 colours (including a soft blend) layered up to create the image, each layer of colour was originally a black ink drawing exposed onto an offset Litho plate.

There's a fairly overwhelming amount of good stuff at pick me up this year...its well worth a visit.

I walked along the coast near Burnham on Sea with my parents and younger brother Tim, the rain stopped for long enough for me to do some sketches of Tim drawing in the sand...

A Swallow, a Swift and a House Martin

(Caught By The River)

Its a little late but these are some shots of a couple of pages I did in St Judes publication 'Random Spectacular' (cover by Mark Hearld and Emily Sutton). Its a really good publication, but has sold out very quickly, I don't think you can buy it any more but you can see some other, better pages at St Judes.