Everyone's an artist, including Fat Roland

I will be one of many artists showing work in the 2022 Manchester Open exhibition, launching in a few weeks at HOME.

The idea of the Open is that anyone can display artworks, regardless of background or experience. Their slogan is "Everyone's An Artist". I suppose I have some experience, having illustrated Edinburgh Fringe shows and my columns for Electronic Sound magazine. But the exhibition is very much a level playing field. With painted flowers on. And little marker pen faces on every blade of grass.

The first Manchester Open in 2020 displayed over 500 artworks. If you stacked 500 Mona Lisas on top of each other, the pile would be a bit taller than the Empire State Building. That's quite the elongated edifice of enigmatic smiles.

I love the idea of my piece, which is called Daft Punk At Home With R2-D2, nestled among tonnes of other framed pictures. I hope it'll be overwhelming, like walking into the Louvre and having a hundred masterpieces pelted at your head at once. Ouch. Those frames are sharp. Stop it. OUCH.

My piece was originally produced for an Electronic Sound column about Daft Punk. It was fortuitous that (a) the illustration was produced within HOME's calendar guidelines and (b) it stood on its own as an artwork. Without the writing attached, much of the illustration won't make sense. Which is great. Look out for the little fluff of blue lint. And a Henry hoover (pictured).

I'm hoping the exhibition will catapult me into the highest echelons of artistic genius, and the name Fat Roland will be uttered in the same sentence as famous British artists like Damon Hurst, Tracy Ermine, David Hockey-Stick and the one made of bacon.

The Manchester Open will open (geddit?!) to the public on January 24th, and will keep being open to the public until it stops being open to the public on March 27th. There's an opening weekend from January 21st, but I believe this is just for artists, so if you try and get in and you're not an artist, they cattle-prod you. However, "Everyone's An Artist" so I'm hoping they cattle-prod everyone just to be on the safe side.

More about the Manchester Open here.

Further Fats: Like New Years Day to the sound of Autechre (2009)

Further Fats: Is my Boards Of Canada mash-up art? Don't answer that (2019)