2 3 1 North East England’s Christopher “Christophski” Parkin never set out to become an artist. An accountant by day and musician for fun, he rediscovered drawing during the 2020 lockdown, quickly growing a daily ritual into something entirely unexpected. Experimenting across artistic mediums with a spirit of curiosity, Christophski found linocut, or perhaps linocut found him, through an art subscription box. And the rest was history. He developed a distinctive style that blends bold relief printing with playful nods to folklore, film, music, pop culture, and the simple moments in life, creating work he enjoys making and that others enjoy in turn. He is now celebrating his first solo exhibition, Introducing Christophski, at the Heart of the Tribe Gallery in Glastonbury, England, and took time out for us to reflect on this serendipitous journey and what this milestone means for him. You’re a lifelong doodler and musician who only started making art seriously again during the pandemic, leading you to discover linocut. How did you take the leap to start creating? And how did you stay motivated through all the learning curves, artistic blocks and daily ups and downs of life? I absolutely did not start out with any great ambitions to make “art” or to be creative, and I feel like this is an amazing “thing” that has happened to me, which evolved during lockdown. We were trying to keep our young kids entertained, educated and motivated whilst also working full-time from home when my wife came across an art challenge with a new prompt each day. That seemed like a great addition to the daily routine to give the kids another thing to keep them busy. My wife and I joined in to help motivate them and we’d all compare and talk about what we’d drawn. I was soon hooked and looked forward to the next prompt as soon as I’d finished the current one. Before long I found myself eagerly checking my phone at midnight to see what had been posted for the next day’s prompt. I continued taking part long after the kids lost interest and I became part of a fantastic little online community, many of whom I remain friends with. However, the prompt has long since become defunct and sadly, that particular community is no longer as active as it once was. Though I continue to regularly take part in the Drawingskool weekly prompt, which is another fantastic little online community. I relearned how to draw and began experimenting with painting, which I’d never really done before, and ended up signing up for a quarterly art materials subscription. What initially kept me motivated was an extraordinarily supportive online community, the challenge of trying to create everyday, and also a sense of friendly competition and camaraderie with a chap who has become a very close friend. We now take the time to meet up with each other in person, despite living at opposite ends of the country. I also started to develop a sense of purpose from being creative which I really hadn’t expected. In the early days I didn’t suffer from creative blocks particularly as I didn’t take it too seriously or feel like there was much at stake. At worst, if one day I didn’t feel particularly excited about a prompt, I would do a quick doodle to mentally “tick the box” and move on. But after a while, I started to enjoy finding different or alternative takes on a prompt, sometimes finding ways to subvert it, and bizarrely, I found a bit of a crutch in incorporating a cartoon King Kong into my pictures. This came about after drawing Kong as part of my response to an “Empire State Building” prompt. The following day I was met with the
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