Artist, and adopted Scot, David Shrigley has pledged his allegiance by teaming up with Pringle of Scotland, and judging by the results, has clearly got the sardonic national outlook down. Although he also displays a certain amount of fashion nous, with his narrator making a comment on fashion's preferred body type that is, given the emerging trend for T&A on the runway, with hindsight almost prophetic:
"The models are horribly skinny like skeletons... personally, I'd like to see a normal-shaped lassie modelling them with a big bottom and a nice pair of hooters."
David Shrigley's careless, somewhat menacing, doodle-like drawings act as small reminders of the darker side of the everyday things, extracting human flaws, doubts and insecurities and encouraging us to laugh cruelly at them, out loud, although he says that he is not misanthropic and just thinks people are ‘a bit stupid.’ His work walks an irreverent line between humour and melancholy profundity. It is the visual equivalent of writing on a post-it note something you would not say out loud.
Shrigley graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1991, in Environmental Art, and is remarkably tall, and remarkably sweet and wholesome-looking, although perhaps this is only remarkable if you’ve seen some of the stuff his pen comes out with.
He describes the process of working as: “Like lifting a jug and just letting the water pour out", and has previously listed his influences as including The Fall, graffiti, human conversation, Joseph Conrad, and the social sciences, and says that he is probably more influenced by literature than by art. “But that’s not to say that I don’t like art. There’s a difference between things that you like, and things that you’re influenced by.” So what does he like? “I like the internet, and I like radio, and television, and film, and literature, and music. And I quite enjoy poems. I never studied poetry or anything like that, because I went to art school. Any idiot can go to art school.
"People always ask what would you be doing if you weren’t an artist, and I always say a psychiatrist or whatever, and they say “oh yes, very interesting, write that down, relate it to your work” but I think actually I’d quite like to be an actor. Not that I’d be any good at it. If I wasn’t an artist I’d be an unsuccessful actor.”
