To reach Sam’s shed office, we walked out through the back of the house and across the garden, where the leaves were still wet with rain.
It’s lined floor to ceiling with books. On the desk beside his Mac, a microphone he uses for his podcast and a phrenology-style head-map from another century, on which “Sublimity” sits above the left ear and “Calculation” above the outer edge of the eyebrow.
On a shelf, I picked out a small postcard of Proust. On the record player to the left: Elton John, Live In Moscow.
I didn’t realise it was Elton John, Live In Moscow, when I first drew the picture. Sam pointed it out afterwards, and I went back in and added enough detail to indicate it.
Which brings up a small point about this whole enterprise. A picture like this is an attempt to capture what matters or amuses or anyway pleases the person making it. In this case, that extended to a very specific 1980 live recording on a turntable I would otherwise have left as a generic dark disc.
It also pleased me to draw Sam twice – absorbed in a manuscript on paper, on the left, and (on the right) looking at his computer. Why? I suppose because I too am endlessly pulled between analogue and digital.
This is one of three pictures I made at Galley Beggar. Alongside it hang Elly in her first-floor office and the two of them on the living-room floor with Sirius.
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Part of Contain Multitudes at Burgh House, 18-23 August 2026.