I love it when a plan comes together.

It all begins with a sketch - on the basis that if it doesn’t work on a Post-it, it won’t work.

It’s a maxim I try to stick to, because it generally works. I’ve encountered so many people who try to ‘fix’ ideas by adding more complexity and more and more detail, but it’s actually easier to go back to the beginning and start again. On a new Post-it.

I used to have lots of scraps of pieces of paper, but of late have used notebooks - which I tend to treat as bound Post-its. This one from Tiger at €4 is my current favourite. It functions perfectly, looks smart, but not so smart as to discourage you from soiling it with scribbles (I have plenty of those too), the paper is cheap enough that you can scrap it as often as you like (they provide perforations) and best of all, being spiral-bound, you can bend it right back so it reads both ways.

The recent work for the Hunt Museum Summer Exhibition started with a sketch too of course. Like all simple ideas it seemed obvious - if the purpose was to contrast two artists, then why not have two books in one? Yeats reading from the front and the Henry part reading from the, eh, other front. It meant double the facing on the shelf and made for interesting promotional material. 

The best thing was seeing the scribble physically manifest itself in a 120 page case-bound book, promotional posters and material, a spot on the TV news and a satisfied client.

I love it when a plan comes together.

(First published September 2017)