Falling  head over heels in love with steel nib drawings as I did in the 1950s especially the incredibly beautiful ones published in Punch Magazine that my father subscribed to was my first addiction to the splotchy and if you could pull it off dramatic detail possible with India ink and what seemed millions of insufferable nibs and their plastic or wooden handles that cost a fortune. Six pence each!

I drew arrogantly on the family tea table with my kind father guiding me along the pen and ink path to likenesses of both Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and later I began to try to draw intricate and difficult objects from real life such as our plum tree in blossom or my Auntie Marg done from memory that was nothing like her.

The love of pen and ink drawing has survived in my spirit and my soul forever and ever and this year I have drawn from mythologies as well as my love of social realism as well as cartoon whimsies of whatever my mind has offered to the rest of me.

In an age of almost fabulous uncertainty it has been like discovering an oasis in suffering where loneliness of the body and the spirit has the opportunity to live in a new cartoon drawing that the artist has no concept of inventing as it occurred in joy.

– Barry Dickins, 2018