Anthony Hodgson London, United Kingdom

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I grew up in the ancient port of Whitby, in northern England which sits between the North Yorkshire Moors and the North Sea. This dramatic environment has influenced my art as much as my multi-ethnic ancestry and popular culture. As do the conflicts within our existence: light and dark; life and death; imprisonment and freedom; censorship and expression.

The art goes back a long way. Ever since I was at school and could get away with it, I could be found decorating the pages of my schoolbooks with my black Bic pen with comic characters, spacecraft and strange creatures inspired by the sci-fi and fantasy worlds of Dr Who and Blake’s 7, Space 1999, Star Trek and Star Wars, Narnia and Middle-Earth, Dungeons and Dragons and that wonderful cult British comic, 2000AD. It was in its weekly pages that my younger brother and I discovered Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and Slaine through the amazing artwork of Alan Moore, Mike McMahon and many others.

At university (Leeds) the doodling continued, becoming darker (more skulls), more ethnic (I had discovered George Bain and Celtic Art) and influenced by my discoveries of the opposite sex, alcohol, culture and the occult, more complex. Moving to France in the mid-90's and being exposed to another culture before returning to London to work with the homeless, alcohol and drug addicts whilst struggling with my own mental health issues injected more ingredients into the creative storm within.

The doodling continued through the years and still today, I continue to be inspired by anything and everything: people, history, popular culture, the conflicts within our daily lives: light and dark; life and death; imprisonment and freedom; censorship and expression and the relationships between them. Currently I find my inspiration is drawn as much from my northern heritage as an artist who can claim British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Scandinavian roots as the observations of contemporary society and culture. Thus you are just as likely to see Celtic knotwork, Viking drakkar, the Green Man or angels and angels as you are Spongebob, Star Trek or Covid masks and needles: the result is a veritable smorgasbord of imagery.

The process is deceptively simple and has remained the same over many years. An idea will surface from the creative maelstrom of imagery that is my mind. I will put pen (usually a Staedler or Mitsubishi Fineliner) to paper and, through a sort of stream-of-consciousness process, over the coming months, the image will appear, line by line.