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BBC<\/p>\nBBC<\/p>\n
Comedian and ceramicist Johnny Vegas is backing the DRAW! project as part of Bradford City of Culture 2025 <\/p>\n
Comedian Johnny Vegas has urged people to pick up their pens and pencils and “just have a go” at drawing as part of Bradford’s City of Culture 2025 celebrations.<\/p>\n
Vegas is November’s featured artist for DRAW!, a project inspired and supported by Bradford-born artist David Hockney.<\/p>\n
Each month, a different artist selects a subject to inspire the public to submit their drawings to the City of Culture website, with Vegas choosing the theme of “something that makes you happy”.<\/p>\n
Vegas explained: “I don’t know why I chose ‘things that make you happy’, being the misery guts that I am. I just think that encapsulates sketching and drawing in general.”<\/p>\n
Vegas trained as a ceramicist before turning to comedy, but returned to it during the Covid pandemic and has since exhibited his ceramics at museums across the country.<\/p>\n
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Johnny Vegas<\/p>\n
Vegas says he felt like the man he sketched many years ago had been a “silent friend”<\/p>\n
For the DRAW! project he submitted a line drawing sketch of a man reading a newspaper in his local pub from the late 1980s, stating: “Daring to be different, to be the real you, makes me happy.”<\/p>\n
“I chose to do a sketch that I did way, way back in the day and it just made me giggle,” he said.<\/p>\n
Vegas said he had drawn the sketch while he was an art student and was sat in a pub in St Helen’s.<\/p>\n
He said he felt an affinity with the man who was reading a broadsheet newspaper at the time \u2013 feeling they were both outsiders.<\/p>\n
“I felt like I’d made a silent friend,” he said.<\/p>\n
Vegas said he had come back to drawing later in life and it had been “like a piece of the jigsaw I was always missing”.<\/p>\n
“I found all my old sketchbooks. I forgot the randomness of what I would sit down and decide to sketch and draw,” he explained.<\/p>\n
“Nobody necessarily had to look at it, but you just try and capture this with a bit of a scribble and if it’s rubbish, if you think it isn’t good enough, it’s good enough for you, it’s a memory still, a memory captured.”<\/p>\n
‘I’m like a magpie’<\/p>\n
Vegas featured in a Channel 4 documentary earlier this year, which followed him creating a public sculpture in St Helens while navigating an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis.<\/p>\n
He said: “In education, I was your classic ‘could do well, must try harder’. It was attention span, it was ADHD.”<\/p>\n
Vegas said he worked on many different art projects at once.<\/p>\n
“There’s your ADHD and evidence that everything catches your eye,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I’m like a magpie, but I’m not bothered if it’s shiny or owt, I’ll just have it. I’ll draw it, I’ll sketch it.”<\/p>\n
Vegas said he believed art was increasingly “vital” in a world with more and more diagnoses of neurodivergencies. <\/p>\n
“In an era where we are increasingly aware of neurodiversity, the arts are being cut in education and everywhere,” he said. <\/p>\n
“The arts are suffering and there are more children that will not discover their potential because they’re being told they are rubbish at science and maths. <\/p>\n
“But they can excel within the arts, within creativity, and they need to be given that opportunity.”<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Vegas said he had taken up working with ceramics again during the Covid pandemic<\/p>\n
Vegas encouraged sketchers wanting to take part in the DRAW! project not to worry about the quality of their work, but to just give it a go.<\/p>\n
“Having come back to art, I’m drawing again and sketching again. It’s a release,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s almost like something I’ve carried around. There should not be that fear of giving it a go.<\/p>\n
“What I love about this is that it’s for you. Just do it for you and see how it makes you feel and it might really surprise you.<\/p>\n
“Just have a go. You might find you’re far better than what you know. It’s something that you’ve talked yourself out of over the years.<\/p>\n
“Don’t worry if it doesn’t look like something that’s hanging in a national gallery. It doesn’t matter. It’s your sketchbook.”<\/p>\n
Previous artists behind the Bradford-based project have included David Hockney, Dame Zandra Rhodes and Harry Hill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BBC Comedian and ceramicist Johnny Vegas is backing the DRAW! project as part of Bradford City of Culture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-156640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}