Michel Faber – A Straight Line to the Imagination

Michel Faber (born 1960) is the author of a wide range of fiction and poetry including Under The Skin, Undying, The Fahrenheit Twins, The Fire Gospel and The Crimson Petal and the White. Less well known is that both he and his late wife Eva were photographers and visual artists. Michel will talk about his artworks -- technically accomplished, closely based on life drawing – and contrast them with those of his wife -- less figurative, spindlier, weirder, yet ultimately more soulful. The ways in which life drawing skills (and lack thereof) can help and hinder artistic vision is a fascinating area of debate. This will lead into a wider discussion of comics and graphic novels (an area of lifelong interest to Michel), focusing on the differences between the neo-Pre Raphaelite "masters" like Barry Windsor-Smith and the underground/indie artists who express themselves in technically cruder ways. There will also be a reading from The Book of Strange New Things, in which the artists from an alien race paint scenes from the Bible, freshly and puzzlingly re-imagining iconography that has long been codified in Western art.