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Aroogah
Very nice that anyone remember me at all!! A brief update.
I managed to flee the print works.
I helped a pal out who was running a microbrewery and together we turned it into a larger brewery, I became a brewer, then operations manager of the brewery.
Sadly during lockdown my mate ran out of cash so I started selling my print art to make ends meet. And… it worked. I work in Linocut prints, and strangely enough I seem to be programmed to work in negative space the wrong way round.
Obviously selling art to the cosmos doesn’t pay the bills, so I signed up to work for Ocado.
From 4am to 12pm then 4pm to midnight I shipped folks groceries across Yorkshire. It was fucking mental, and one of the best jobs I ever had. Strange shifts in March, snow blasting across the moors, delivering shopping to farmers down mad tracks in my Mercedes Sprinter. So weird. I delivered for Morrisons too, to really poor areas, elderly and mentally challenged people. Evening & night I was lugging a metric ton of shopping to folk all over the region, from Manchester to Bradford, Selby, the coast, all over. It was pretty epic.
But why deliver shopping when you want to either be an artist or a verbal filthmonger?
The shifts at Ocado and Morrisons were 4am - 12pm, then 4pm to midnight.
Those hours in between I feverishly worked at making Linocut print art.
For 6 months I worked 90 hour weeks making art and delivering shopping, and on weekends I bought a gazebo to sell my art from. I joined travelling artisan fairs throughout Yorkshire and sold my prints across the same range I delivered groceries.
Sadly, I only had room for one job. The overlap of jobs no longer worked.
So… I chose art.
I quit grocery deliveries and became a full time artist, and I made it work.
Now, I press all of you, if you can be arsed, to see my very first post. Probably on the old blog then this thread, I don’t know. This was maybe 10 years ago.
It said, “I thought I was going to be an artist. How wrong I was. I fell into reprographics twenty years ago and I can't get out”.
I wrote this well over ten years ago.
Well, since then, I got out.
I’m no longer in Reprographics.
I’m now a full time artist.
My name is no longer General Lucifer.
It is Matthew Hooper. I trade as HuPa Linocuts on Etsy, Instagram and Facebook. If you want to see my work it’s on my website http://www.hupalinocut.com and buying a piece of my work will gently push this odd little boat slightly further and further away from the factory.
Thank you.