Who: Robert Shepard
What: Drawing
My name is Robert, and I draw sort of sketchy cartoons and write stories that are half set in the day-to-day world and half out of it. As someone who’s on the autistic spectrum and has had mental health issues for a long time I think they express how I feel: like the world people talk about when we meet on the street is real and valid, but a tiny part of both ourselves and the wider world we live in.
At the moment I’m helping crowdfund for Stimbook, a collection of fiction and non-fiction by autistic people which I’ll have a story in. It’s about my experiences at university as an evolution student, where I struggled through not fitting in both with the very confident people in my halls and the fact the world was billions of years old and civilisation was somehow existing now. And it’s about meeting a selkie – a seal pretending to be a human – and talking to her about how she felt apart from the world. There were a lot of different levels of alienation at that time, and this was a way to try and bring them all together and to validate them. I collected my twitter thread about the story here: itsrobertsblog.blogspot.com
I post wee drawings on Instagram at RobertDraws, both ones I do now and ones I find from time to time. I will do topical ones about mental health if people ask me, because that sounds like a good idea.
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