Chris Sutcliff

I ran excitedly out of the house and into the street clutching the remote control in my hand. The new batteries had cost me nearly six pounds but I had bought them anyway, the cost was a tiny sacrifice what with all the changes I was about to make. I needed to test the remote before I put my plan into action so I aimed it straight at the sky and pressed STAND BY / ON. Nothing happened but I realised that, as there were already some clouds and it was raining, then the sky must already be ON. So I pressed REWIND because yesterday it had been sunny and that had been much better. Nothing happened. It was still today and it was still raining. Something had gone wrong.

Just then Professor Hirschhorn, who is the wisest of all the alley cats, came padding through a gap in a fence and straight up to me, purring and twining his ginger tail around my ankles. He hopped up onto a nearby wall so as to be nearer to my face, twitched his whiskers in that wise way of his and fixed me with his great green cat eyes. Then he said to me:

“You cannot control your world with mere devices. You cannot rewind your life to happier days, fast forward through all the tedious times, pause when things appear to be at their best or stop when you need a break from it all. You cannot change your channel, nor record the things that you are due to miss so that you can live through them at a time that suits you better. This is your life and this is how it is lived – one moment at a time. More importantly this is your ONLY life and to treat it as casually as you do your television is a travesty. If you truly want to control your world, to control it for the right reasons, for the benefit of everyone, I’ll tell you how. Cats know the ancient secret wisdoms, but they are secret for a REASON, you must never repeat what I am about to say. All you need to do is………”

Professor Hirschhorn had to stop there because I had taken the butt of the remote control and used it to smash his ginger head in. You see, nobody likes a smart arse giving you advice when you don’t want it and also I had found the experience of being addressed in perfect English by a cat absolutely terrifying. When a cat talks to you it is because you are mentally maladjusted and should not be allowed to be on the streets near other people, armed with a remote control and it’s expensive new batteries.

Acrylic, Ink, Biro

8 x 5.5 inches

2003

Acrylic, Print taken from a Leaf

8 x 5.5 inches

2003

Acrylic, Biro

8 x 5.5 inches

2003

My very good friend Emma Storton told me that Tabula Rasa is Latin for ‘Blank Tablet’ (slate), from which we derive ‘Blank Canvas’. I was impressed with this new knowledge so I wrote it on the then empty page. I went home inspired by my new phrase and put these two images on the blank pages, making them no longer blank, making it difficult to determine what I was thinking when I thought it would fit the title. I didn’t really grasp that one did I.

Acrylic, Ink, Graphite, Photography

8 x 5.5 inches (Each Panel)

2003

Contrary to popular opinion, the man on the left is not Ben Elton. The man on the right may be me only I don’t have a brick wall on my face.

Acrylic

8 x 5.5 inches

2003

No. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never even heard of Mark Rothko or Lucio Fontana, and the very idea that I would take the main elements of their very famous works and fuse them together like some sort of aesthetic mule just to call it my own is ludicrous and offensive. I nicked the style of the title from Antoni Tapies who has the extraordinary ability to title all his paintings with a literal verbal description of exactly what is going on in the painting. Genius.

Acrylic, Ink

8 x 5.5 inches

2002

A completely imagined scene based on the numerous barnacle encrusted struts that pierce the sea and reach for the sky around Portsmouth. The keen eyed among you will notice that my interpretation of perspective bears no relation whatsoever to all the known teachings of science, art or nature. Damn the keen eyed among you.

Acrylic, Inks, Wood Stain, Wood Adhesive, Varnish, Printed Text on Paper

8 x 5.5 inches

2001

I thought that I understood the world. Then Iggy Pop made a car insurance commercial and I realised that some things in life are worth understanding and some things are just sold to you by those intangible twits who put a price tag on everything. Screw those guys, I hope they marry Traffic Wardens and suffer an endless and bewildering social exile.

One of the ways in which I have managed to make sense of my own world is through working on my sketch books. I wanted to share some of my sketch book work with you so I had Rob (friendly neighbourhood woolly haired Scouser tech-boy) put a ‘Sketch’ section on the site and I have begun the long process of populating it with my favourite pages. This is a ‘long process’ and not a single job because I am reliant on a string of independent circumstances twining harmoniously together in order for me to deliver the goods. You see, the pages cannot be effectively scanned as this would mean flattening the book, an act that would simultaneously break its spine and break my heart. It is very old and well thumbed and mostly held together with sellotape and willpower, a single act of ruffianism will reduce it to confetti. So I have to sacrifice some picture quality and photograph them instead and for this I have to borrow my Dad’s camera. Since my Dad’s retirement he now goes on holiday every eight minutes or so, taking said camera with him. He turns visibly pale when I ask to use it. The four pictures I have managed to put on the site at the time of this writing were taken on the pavement on my front street in the sun and came out quite nicely (perspective skewed pages and crap photographic ability aside). The next twenty I took indoors with a variety of precariously balanced lamps and they came out dull and lifeless and were discarded immediately. I got an even tan though and nearly set the room on fire. So I need the sun for the right light and there is my next problem – Burnley gets sunny for about 6 minutes once every 47 years; so I will be 79 before I can photograph another four pages – Provided my Dad isn’t in Kuala Lumpur with the bloody camera. Finally, our internet is broken at Matt’s house where I live, so even if I had more pictures I would have to find an ingenious way of getting them onto the site. Like tying them to the leg of a carrier pigeon and stuffing it beak first into the disk drive, hoping for the best. We tried to get Sky to fix the internet only to discover that they now employ brick walls in their call-centres instead of people. We talked to the wall for a while and then realised it would just be quicker to grow old and die and not need the internet anymore. Honestly, how hard does this have to be?

It took me precisely two years to fill my first sketch book. I initially bought it as a means to combat boredom while the footie was on at my mate’s house. I’d go and visit, armed with a fancy pen (£3 WHSmiths), and start drawing and see what happened. What happened was an unexpected and extremely weird awakening of self analysis through scribbles. This book is about 5 inches square with 126 pages and if you read it you would stick me in a padded cell. I laid my soul bare in that tiny volume using just words and pictures and accidentally sorted my life out in the process. It is ten years since I completed it and even now some of the pages are rather painful for me to re-visit so I rarely pick it up. I named it “Pandora’s Box” for precisely that reason. Not one page of it will ever appear on this site.

With my psychoanalysis behind me I decided that my next book was going to be more of a showcase for my artistic talents, nice illustrations with no personal content at all. A plan which fell to shit in about 5 pages. I had totally forgotten that art is about paying homage to all that you love by recreating through yourself. How do you do that without being IN it? I have yet to find the artistic talent I was supposed to be showcasing. Although this book is slightly bigger than the first it has exactly the same amount of pages. The magic two years came and went and I had not finished it. Three years became six years and more and it was not done. Now here we are, ten years down the line and there are still 21 whole pages left to fill. A long time ago I wrote the words “Finish me you Chicken Shit” on strips of masking tape and stuck them to the cover to inspire a bit of urgency for completion. Those words are still there and are now its permanent cover and title, a constant mocking dare that I cannot ignore. It’s actually a good thing I haven’t finished though and I’ll tell you why – I only work on it when I have no canvasses to work on. So the last ten years have seen more canvas commissions than the preceding two – commissions that have mostly come from the book itself. It has been a powerful portfolio for me in a way that this website has yet to prove itself.

There are only selected images appearing on this site but I sincerely hope you like them. It will not be the same for me though, I like watching the expressions on peoples faces when they read it, the way they rub their fingers on it to feel all the textures. The internet has joined us and separated us all at the same time. But I can’t fit you all in my house so this will have to do. The most complex image probably took me about 8 hours and the shortest one I whipped out in about ten minutes. Depending on how you look at them they are either fraught with meaning or completely devoid of it, self referential or a reaction to the world, a royal waste of my time or the greatest single achievement I have yet produced. They are the only two things I have ever owned that I would make any sacrifice for, including running into a burning house to retrieve them. They are irreplaceable and, perhaps more importantly, they have no cash value whatsoever. And this is exactly why they have helped me to make sense of the world.

Iggy Pop selling car insurance. I guess you can’t put a price on irony.

Acrylic, Inks, Printed Paper

8 x 5.5 inches (Each Panel)

2001

My reaction to my first Sales job. Every day was a party.