From an interview with Chris Hipkiss: “Well I think I treat my work more or less like a diary. I repeat images through various pictures. I don’t really have a plan. Sometimes when I have an idea in my head, I just draw a little picture about this large [indicates a size around four by five inches]… might take me ten minutes, and that’s the time I decide whether to do the drawing or not. If the picture is something that I don’t like, then I won’t even contemplate drawing it, but if it’s an idea that I want to draw then, that’ll be my next picture. It usually happens about three quarters the way through the previous picture. By that time, I’m like raring to finish this work and carry on with the next one. When it comes to planning it, it really doesn’t matter how big it is or how small it is, it usually takes probably about fifteen or twenty minutes to plan it on paper. I put a few lines in just to know… Even with the large picture, even with the thirty-five foot picture it took me about fifteen minutes to plan and the rest of it was filling in. Certain areas, especially the large work, a lot of areas that I didn’t know what to do, things just came. That’s how I work and something pleases me, a design pleases me, I just carry on and on and on until I’m heartily sick of it. Nowadays, I don’t draw leaves. Some people think that perhaps it’s because I’m describing a wilderness wasteland. I do like dead trees; they’re a part of nature as well. I’ll probably get back into drawing them but at the moment, ça suffit.”

I found this passage and the rest of this interview with Chris Hipkiss very interesting. I often wonder how obsessive artists like him get started on pieces of that magnitude. This large format book is a collection of Chris’s drawings (all made with “3B pencils, hundreds of them…”) plus has a foldout poster of one of his pieces. You can get a copy right here. See more of Chris’s work here.

© Julia Rothman 2007