Mr Bingo
"I’m not gonna be so dramatic as to say that ‘cycling saved me’ but it certainly made my life better."
Mr Bingo was a commercial illustrator for 15 years, working regularly for clients such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, TIME, CH4, The Mighty Boosh & The New York Times. An archive of the thousands of illustrations from this period doesn’t exist online because he got bored once in a motorhome and deleted his entire portfolio website. You can see a small selection of work from this period here.
In 2015 he launched a Kickstarter to fund a book about his Hate Mail project. The campaign featured a rap video and a diverse selection of rewards including being trolled, having your washing up done, going on a date in Wetherspoons, being told to fuck off on Christmas Day and getting shitfaced on a train.
He decided around this period to never work for clients ever again and focus on being some sort of artist which he’s done ever since.
In 2023 Mr Bingo decided to take an entire year off as an experiment and left London with a rucksack and no plan at 8:40pm on Dec 31st 2022. He was spotted in Sri Lanka, Japan and Cornwall.
You can currently find him in his studio/shop at 46 Amwell Street in London. The shop is open on Fridays from 10am – 7:30pm.
Q. Tell us a bit about what you do and what inspires your work?
I’m an artist and I make a living selling prints, original drawings and other bits and pieces. I work from my studio in London which also turns into a shop every Friday. This is a very new experiment (at the time of writing) and has only been open a few days! You can also buy my stuff online which is how I’ve made a living for the past 9 years.
What inspires my work is looking at and listening to the world. Or in other words, everything inspires my work. Because I do funny art, I probably work a bit more like a stand up comedian in a way, I observe life and I think of funny things to say about it.
Q. Where's home and what are the places and spaces that make you happy?
I live in Victoria Park, London but to be honest I’ve always considered my studio a bit more of a home than my flat. The studio is where I spend most of my time and where I ‘live’ the most, my actual home is more of a place to sleep.
The places that make me the most happy are my studio or hiking out in nature, those are the two most important things in my life. I love coastal walking in particular and spent about 100 days last year walking alone on cliff tops in the UK and Portugal. I’m thinking of walking the entire coastline of the UK, it’s 11,073 miles and I reckon if I chip away at it a few months at a time, I can complete it by the time I’m 60! It’s either that, or fall in love with someone, both will do.
Q. What does cycling mean for you and where do like to ride?
I didn’t ever really get cycling until I was 30.
15 years ago I started to suffer from pretty acute anxiety and panic attacks following a divorce and I discovered that going for a bike ride was helpful in that it instantly made me feel a bit better and so it became a bit of a coping mechanism. I bought a second hand vintage town bike and it sort of became my saviour back then. It was dark green and it was my friend and was something I could get on and almost ‘ride off’ the anxiety to an extent. I’m not gonna be so dramatic as to say that ‘cycling saved me’ but it certainly made my life better.
Thankfully my anxiety has gone now and although my bike is still a faithful old friend, its main purpose is now to travel around and get from A to B. If I can, I’ll do every journey by bike.
Everyone thinks cycling in London is dangerous (and it is), but for me the benefits of it outweigh the risk. Commuting to work everyday on a bike is a pleasure and a nice bit of the day, whereas commuting on a packed bus or tube is just a nasty necessity that you wish to be over for most of the duration of the journey.
I don’t really have any favourite routes. I cycle along the canal to work every day which is a nice way of getting to work. You have to be patient with all the other users (joggers, pedestrians, dogs, prams) but it’s nice to be able to not worry about getting squished under a lorry or a bus. I also like the fact that I get at least one hour a day of free thinking on my bike, a time where I can’t go on my phone and I’m forced to have my own thoughts.
In conclusion, I f*cking love cycling and I couldn’t imagine a life without it.
