Cagoule

Cagoule is out now!
Birds, bras and books are all covered in this issue along with opinions on whether doubt is good, stories and comic strips + more.

It's available with free shipping worldwide from present joys 

Rob Lowe is Supermundane

I now have two websites! supermundane.com for my art & personal work and rob-lowe.co.uk for my graphic design, magazines and lettering.

They are both me, just slighty different sides of me...have fun looking around.

Kibbo Kift II

40...

It's my 40th Birthday today. My big brother's family made me this cake.
It was based on an old self portrait, undated a little in the hair area!
It was amazing. I was amazed.

Havelock Walk Open Studios this weekend!

Bit late notice but it open studios on Havelock Walk this weekend (16th - 17th July)
Come and say hello from 11am - 6pm each day.

It's just by Forest Hill Station You can get there from Victoria or London Bridge (15mins)
and is only 20mins away from Shoreditch on the East London Line.

Here's a map

Group of Ten Zine and Painting

"Recently I have been seeing faces in drawings that I find each morning."

The Group of Ten is a short story about a man who finds a new painting on his kitchen table each day with no idea how it got there. In these paintings he recognises something he can take as being life. 

Numbered limited edition of 200 with hand-painted, signed and stamped face painting. (due to these being originals they will differ from the ones show) 20 page story zine, with 10 illustrated pages.

You can buy it for £6 from here 

 

 

Me and me mural

Havelock Walk Open Studio

The first weekend of the Havelock Walk Open Studios is this weekend.

Come along and have a look around artists studios and see my latest mural.
There will be prints and other stuff for sale, with the prints being sold at a special
one off 15% discount!

Havelock Walk is 2mins from Forest Hill Station which is on the East London Line (25 mins from Shoreditch High Street) or on National Rail from either Victoria or London Bridge.

Here's a map

Party!!

I've organised a Happening, if you can organise a Happening that is.

On Saturday the 9th of April the Victoria in Dalston will be taken over by a bunch of graphic artists. The evening is split into three sections. Firstly from 5pm-7pm there will be readings from myself (accompanied by shurti box) and Now Owl + Nic Burrows. Then from 7pm-10:30pm there will be performances from the wizard Yulebringer, Andrew Rae, Nick White & Owen Gildersleeves, and the first outing from the latest band from the Nous Vous boys: Glow Wing. Finally from 10:30pm-2am there will be djs encouraging dancing and generally much revelry.

As if this isn't enough, all attending will get a numbered zine with artwork by all performing, a cd of their music and a badge to proudly wear to say "I was there"

It's £5 in advance or £6 on the door and is going to be a barnstormer.

See you there.

Buy tickets Here
More info Here

magma x supermundane

I've produced some exclusive designs for Magma. There is a tote bag with some of my words set in one of my typefaces and a print called "It could be such a simple world". The print is only £30 and is a whopping 50cm x 70cm two colour screenprint! They have both been made in limited quantities so get them while you can either from any of the Magma shops or online here

Havelock Walk

I've moved into a new studio, it's in South London. SE23! Which isn't as far away from Central London as it sounds. The address is 28a Havelock Walk, London SE23 3HG. Send me something nice...

Why I Love Secondhand books

I bought this book yesterday from my local bookshop (My Back Pages in Balham) and it encompassed pretty much everything I like about secondhand books. 

I'd never heard of Jorge Amado but it looked like an interesting book so i decided to pick it up.

The cover looked strangely homo-erotic but from reading the back it turned out that Quincas Wateryell, the man in the portrait, was a womanising drunk and the tale was about his death (both of them) and the clash between his drunken lifestyle and that of his middle-class family. It sounded interesting and short enough to read in one sitting, so I paid my £3 and went to have a coffee.

Inside the book was why I like secondhand books so much. 

I doubt that I would have ever come across Jorge Amado in a normal bookshop, finding a new author is always interesting, but this book had lots more to give than just its story.

Inside are semi-abstract line drawing by an artist called Emil Antonucci. I have no idea who he is and I can't find much information about him on the internet other than he was also a graphic designer. The illustrations have a wonderful unstructured quality about them that fit with the books content. I'm not sure if he did the cover as well, it is nothing at all like the drawings within and has a more kitsch feel. Personally I would have loved to have seen a cover in the same style as the internal pictures.

As well as these illustrations, on the title page a former owner of the book has crossed out the books title and written there own translation of the original Portuguese:

Read: 

The Death and Death of Quincas Shoutwater

The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell

This is a terrible translation!

I agree with whoever wrote this that their translation is better, it sounds like a much more interesting book and Shoutwater is a more convincing name than Wateryell (and still works within the context of the book).

Finally, hidden amongst the pages was a tariff sheet for a New York hotel called Algonquin. 

The sheet looks like it was probably from the eighties (there is a date written in the back of the book in pencil: 21/09/02, the book itself is a first edition printed in April 1980).

The hotel dates back to 1902, is still open and has a history of literary and theatrical lodgers. 

All these things add up to my love of secondhand books. The story itself turn out to be really enjoyable and I'll look out for more Jorge Amado books. The drawings of Emil Antonucci are brilliant and inspirational - I'm already looking for other books he has illustrated. Finally, I'd like to think that the re-titling was done in the Hotel Algonuin by a pedantic, but failed, author during the craziness of eighties New York, but I guess I'll never know.

All that for £3.

Once Human

I've just finished a new window painting at the Skinny Dip headquarters on Silver Place. It's the first time I have painted anything like this, the main problem was doing the circles which I did using a suction cup and a length of string. Also, painting at this scale it was quite hard to work out what was happening with the pattern - as always it was improvised. I'm pretty happy with end result though.

Odd Not Even

Happy New Year!

I was asked to contribute to the new issue of The Liberated Press – a broadsheet freebie produced for Libertys and given away in places like Magma and Concrete Hermit. The theme of this issue is 135, which is the age of the mock-tudor store. I wrote a poem, inspired by the fact that the numbers 1,3 and 5 are consecutive if you remove the even numbers.

You can see this issue and the first one on The Liberated Press website here