In mid-October, my
wife came home from town with a card advertising for submissions to
this annual art exhibition. So I decided to give it a go. My first
thought was to submit Wolf in a Sheepskin – it was the standard I
felt I had to aim for, anyway.
I was booked on a
linocut workshop with Eric Gaskell at the beginning of November. Eric
is a formidable printmaker and I attend a weekly art class he leads,
so I knew I'd learn a lot. This is the print that emerged. The
starting point was a few still-life drawings I had done at the other
class. The skull, by the way, is a replica belonging to my son.
As I worked on the
print, this Ernst Barlach/Kathe Kollwitz vibe emerged that I wasn't
expecting when I started out. I was so pleased with it I thought I'd
give it a name and enter it for the exhibition. (It's called “Still
Life with wine Glass”.
My wife was away
that weekend and I was on a roll, so I carried on over the next day
or so to create another image. This one inspired by another Feline and Strange song that had been haunting me. Medusa is a song of rape
survival and victim blaming. So the image is Medusa haunted by the
frozen faces of those who hate her, always reminding her, even when
she closes her eyes.
This one is a
woodcut. It's different to lino in that it is inclined to fight back,
and the act of creating the image requires more... violence. Which
seems appropriate somehow.
Anyway, I decided
both were better than Wolf, so I submitted both. A panel of 4 people,
who change each year, decide which entrants should go into the
exhibition. So I felt having 2 relatively different images increased
the chance of at least one being chosen.
So I was delighted
to get an email confirming that Medusa had been chosen. But when I
turned up to collect the rejected print, it turned out that Still
Life had been accepted and Medusa rejected. Administrative error. The
plague of working life even affects art galleries. Just so you know.
Still delighted,
though.
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