Ted Mahsun

Anyone who's grown up with Roald Dahl would know Quentin Blake's wonderful illustrations. The Guardian interviews him : Is there anything he can't draw? "I stay away from motor cars. And I can't do architectural drawings, really. What I want to convey is movement and gesture and atmosphere. I like drawing anything that is doing something. Dragons are good because you can arrange them in interesting ways across the page, get people to ride on them. I can't seem to keep birds out of my books." You can see them not only in his edition of Aristophanes' The Birds and his book with John Yeoman called Featherbrains, but in a grinning self-portrait featuring him dangling from a ceiling fan, pencils stuffed in his pockets, papers and birds flapping round. His grin is the still centre to the chaos.

Woohoo! I haven't felt like this with drawing since primary school! I don't want to sound like a cheesy advert but I can't help it-- ArtRage made me fall in love with drawing all over again! *heart heart* I so want a Wacom tablet now. Drawing with a mouse (and a crappy one, at that) is going to give me RSI if I keep up this pace!

I don't have one drop of art talent in my blood but that's not about to stop me exposing the innocent world to my masterpieces! As you can see, I've been messing about with ArtRage . Look out art world! Here I come! Now to get one of those Wacom tablet thingamajiggies.

I must be stating the obvious here, but I think A. Samad Said is a fucking genius. I just came back from the Daerah Samad exhibition currently running at Galeri Petronas and I'm still feeling floored. I don't remember the last time I felt this way after going to an art exhibition. Pak Samad's sketches are, at a glance, appear to be random blotches of ink and coffee stains with a dash of poetry to top it off. But looking carefully reveals that these sketches of seemingly random and impromptu lines evoke images and thoughts that must have been playing on Pak Samad's mind at the time. Some of the haiku-esque works are simply beautiful: kita juga masih menyimpan peta dan hikayat lama, membuka jendela dan pintu sendiri, kita masih akrab disambut mentari* Beneath these words Pak Samad is a chaotic mess of lines that form what appears to be an urban squatter settlement, with towering skyscrapers looming in the background. The message that the sketches seem to want to tell are ...