Comedian urges aspiring artists to get drawing

Comedian and ceramicist Johnny Vegas is backing the DRAW! project as part of Bradford City of Culture 2025

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.

Vegas is November's featured artist for DRAW!, a project inspired and supported by Bradford-born artist David Hockney.

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".

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."

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.

Vegas says he felt like the man he sketched many years ago had been a "silent friend"

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."

"I chose to do a sketch that I did way, way back in the day and it just made me giggle," he said.

Vegas said he had drawn the sketch while he was an art student and was sat in a pub in St Helen's.

He said he felt an affinity with the man who was reading a broadsheet newspaper at the time – feeling they were both outsiders.

"I felt like I'd made a silent friend," he said.

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".

"I found all my old sketchbooks. I forgot the randomness of what I would sit down and decide to sketch and draw," he explained.

"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."

'I'm like a magpie'

Vegas featured in a Channel 4 documentary earlier this year, which followed him creating a public sculpture in St Helens while navigating an ADHD diagnosis.

He said: "In education, I was your classic 'could do well, must try harder'. It was attention span, it was ADHD."

Vegas said he worked on many different art projects at once.

"There's your ADHD and evidence that everything catches your eye," he said.

"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."

Vegas said he believed art was increasingly "vital" in a world with more and more diagnoses of neurodivergencies.

"In an era where we are increasingly aware of neurodiversity, the arts are being cut in education and everywhere," he said.

"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.

"But they can excel within the arts, within creativity, and they need to be given that opportunity."

Vegas said he had taken up working with ceramics again during the Covid pandemic

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.

"Having come back to art, I'm drawing again and sketching again. It's a release," he said.

"It's almost like something I've carried around. There should not be that fear of giving it a go.

"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.

"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.

"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."

Previous artists behind the Bradford-based project have included David Hockney, Dame Zandra Rhodes and Harry Hill.

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