Illustrating Proof magazine for The Justice Gap

The Justice Gap is an online magazine campaigning about the difference between law and justice. The latest issue of its printed magazine, Proof, focuses on crime and punishment.

Here are my contributions. For Hardeep Matharu's feature on the lethal spice epidemic in prisons, I co-opted my House Model: 'Hold this stick of chalk and try not to look double-jointed.'








The body combines elements of that spice-induced dead-puppet flop with a bound figure from my NSFW blog:

One section of the magazine covers miscarriages of justice. Without access to Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six I drew him from photos (then and now) - something I generally recoil from, but that's over-fastidious because artists copied photographs and daguerreotypes as soon as they were invented.

Editor Jon Robins's feature about the wrongful convictions of Sam Hallam and Victor Nealon is illustrated with my drawings from their combined, ultimately unsuccessful Supreme Court appeals about compensation in 2018. Sam Hallam served seven years in prison. Victor Nealon served 17 years.

Heather Williams QC on behalf of Hallam...

...and Dinah Rose QC on behalf of Nealon

Patrick Maguire (left, and see below) outside court before Hallam/Nealon appeals

A preview of the next issue of Proof, featuring justice in a time of austerity, highlights the case of a father with complex legal needs, separated from his wife and stuck in a 'legal aid advice desert' in Suffolk.

Nothing comes out of nowhere: at the back of my mind was a black and white family snap of a paddling moment which became my first attempt at a lithograph decades later:

Other illustrations include drawings by Patrick Maguire of the Maguire Seven, who was wrongfully imprisoned at the age of 14. There are also pictures selected by the Koestler Trust which encourages prisoners, secure patients and detainees to engage with art. Among the photographs are several by Andrew Aitchison who documents life behind bars. Art director: Andrew Stocks

Illustrating moral panic

Justice in a time of moral panic is a collection of essays by lawyers, academics and journalists.

Most of the illustrations in it are by me.

I gave the art director components which he assembled on the page.

I started by wanting to draw a twitter storm - a furious flock of twitter logos. Nope, said a copyright lawyer.

'I want you to imagine you're being attacked by birds,' I said to friends and life-class models who crossed my path, and drew them with tufts of sheep's wool dipped in ink. One day I forgot to bring wool and improvised with Andrex which worked just as well.

Doing proper botanical drawing would kill me. These are stylised leaves from a castor-oil plant, to illustrate a story about ricin.

The most co-operative model is yourself...

...although if I'd realised that the hands would be used so prolifically I would have grabbed some big gnarly male hands to balance my small one.

A selection of inked lines came in useful for layout purposes.

The drawings below were rejected as too esoteric for the brief. The subjects for them were reactions to Irish accents, historic child sexual abuse, rape myths and terrorism. I blog about them here.

Apollo and Daphne, Piero Del Pollaiuolo c1470-80, National Gallery

Justice in a time of moral panic is the theme of the first issue of Proof magazine, edited by Jon Robins and Brian Thornton and designed by Andrew Stocks (£15, The Justice Gap).

John Robins is a freelance journalist. He has written several books and runs The Justice Gap.

Andrew Stocks is a freelance designer and an art director at The Guardian.

Brian Thornton is a senior lecturer in Winchester University’s journalism department and commissioning editor on The Justice Gap.

SLIP HAZARD

I did some drawings for a collection of other people's words to be published by the end of the year.

Not all my drawings made the art director's cut so I'm parking the rejects here, with minimal explanation.

This one is after a painting in the National Gallery, Apollo and Daphne by Piero Del Pollaiuolo, circa 1470-80. I'm not expecting everyone to know the original or to care why I gave it Charlotte Proudman's hairdo. It's based on a Greek myth. Apollo's pursuit of Daphne was thwarted when she turned into a bay tree, Laurus nobilis.



















Make up your own story for this one...

...and for this...

For this one I bought an ice cream from McDonald's and got change for a pound.

After drawing it - or what was left after I'd carried it home in the rain - I tried to dispose of the remains. The gluey off-white sludge sulked in the waste disposal. I held the truncated cone under the tap: it remained coherent, expanded and gave me a cold floppy handshake so I strangled out the water and shoved it in the bin along with the flake.

I tried another version of this using a hazard warning cone. Look, I'm not saying all these drawings were of usable quality or anything. Sometimes you need other people to warn you.

 This is a victim:

I am not drawing puzzles to be solved, but Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson is in my current reading pile. Yeah I know, all that stuff I should have read decades ago.

I don't want all drawings - mine or anyone else's - to have the instant clarity of 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR'. Nor do I expect even that message to be without veils of ambiguity.