Self Portrait at 4am

Since the clocks changed this Autumn, I’ve been ignoring the rest of the world and living in my own time zone. Time for me is eternally “Summer”. So 4am is only getting up a little early for me.
 

I’m always at my best in the mornings. It’s the time to plug away at something before the necessities of the day intervene. So here I am at my peak. In the dead zone between night and day. In the dead zone between Christmas and New Year.  I did a rough pencil drawing in the morning of December 29th that I thought looked promising. Next day I did a brush and ink version based on that. I then prepared a block and traced the image on to the block and inked it. But I wasn’t happy with it so I wiped it off. Next morning I stood back in front of the mirror. And using the ghost of the ink and carbon as the structure, I looked into the mirror for the highest highlights and cut them into the block. Being early morning in winter, I am entirely artificially lit by the LED spotlights in the kitchen. It’s a stark look.
 

Pretty much all the work was done in the hours between 4am and 8am over those 3 days.
 

I felt I needed a self portrait to face 2021. Last year was a year of growth and development for me. At Rugby Open 2019 I felt I needed a “body of work”, and I arbitrarily decided that that meant I needed around 35 images to my name. That’s pretty much what I did during 2020, and I’m really happy with how they all went. Last January I did a little self portrait using nasty dried-out old lino. So this one asks, “After all that, where am I now?”

Year of the Ox/Europa and the Bull

I thought I’d get in early with a card to celebrate Chinese New Year 2021. I didn’t have any time to think about it last year.

The impending year is Year of the Ox, but I’ve stretched it to Europa and the Bull for the forthcoming arrival of Brexit, too. A kind of message to my friends in the EU saying, “don’t get carried away by the Bull.” I know what I mean, anyway.

The Davies Collection contains a woodcut print, Europa and the Bull by Gustav Heinrich Wolff. He used the black bull/white woman motif, but in that print Europa looks much more up for it than old Zeus. When I first thought of doing this, I’d got one of Albrecht Dürer’s Eves in mind, though she turned out to be more frontal than I wanted. So I plugged away trying to get the angle right, and the arm and hand, and the turn of the head. The bull/ox shaped up very quickly, and appeared almost fully formed at the start.

I’m really pleased with the composition. The circularity of the arm leading to the bull’s body, turned back up by the horns, through her body back to the arm. There’s a kind of Yin and Yang thing going on, too. And the horn pointing at her crotch says, “Danger!”

I think I shall print some cards like this, then remove the year for more general use….

Schrödinger’s Exhibition

Seeing that I now have a picture on the wall in an art gallery, but nobody’s allowed to see it, it is simultaneously Art and Not Art. I didn't think I did conceptual stuff...

More Nudity (Artist and Model II)

This is a kind of follow-up to the Artist and Model print. I decided to go back to where the road forked for me and followed the direction I thought I was going in before I went for the larger, more detailed picture.
 

I still have it in my mind to use it on some of the cloth bags – just have to cut the slogan. But I thought I’d make it of a size to fit on a 6” x 4” card. Covering as many bases a possible, as it were.
 

I wanted to handle the artist and model differently. Using the ground as the “flesh tone” for the artist, but then using the ink for the flesh of the model. It’s saying they have different roles here rather than them both being my “subject”. Also I’ve got some dark green bags as well as the whiteish ones, so I can print in white on the dark bag as well as black on the regular ones. This design I think should work reasonably well both ways.

Artist and Model

A glimpse into life at our house. It’s what you always suspected, isn’t it?

However. My wife would have me point out that:
a) she didn’t know I was drawing her and
b) she WAS NOT NAKED.

Well. Ingres’ advice to the young Degas was to draw “many lines. From memory and from nature.” So that’s what I did here. My wife is an incorrigible multitasker. So you often see her sitting in one of these awkward twisted poses so that she can instantly uncoil and attack some project she had left to one side a few minutes before. When I saw her sitting like that, I knew that this was what I was looking for. So I scribbled down a quick drawing. Naked. Because we’ve been together long enough that I know what that looks like. It’s in my head somewhere.

That was just one part of making this picture, so I thought I’d take some time here to walk you through the whole process.

Lockdown has brought some serious tidying and decluttering to our house. In the process we rediscovered a bundle of plain calico shopping bags. Ideal for printing something on, we thought. That’s where this started. I wanted something to convey the idea of “Art” to go on a bag. Something maybe quite logo-like. But as often happens with these things, it spiralled beyond its original motivation.

Here are the original ideas for composition. Dating from mid-October.

I felt the first was too horizontal, so I went for a more elevated viewpoint like you get sometimes in Schiele or Degas. At this stage I was thinking of using the wee figures for the composition and producing something fairly anonymous. But then I thought maybe I could try and make it into a self portrait. I’d got in my mind that painting by Kirchner where he’s stood in a garish dressing gown and the model is sat behind him in her underwear thinking, “Hey. I thought this was supposed to be a painting of me!” Anyway. I began thinking of putting myself in the picture as the artist.

These ideas had been swirling round in my head for maybe two or three weeks when I saw my wife sitting like that. This is the quick drawing I did.

Things then started to move quite quickly. I’ve only noticed this recently, but thinking back, its always been there, though maybe suppressed by the world of work. When the ideas begin to flow, I get quite fidgety. I pace up and down, fiddle with things, wave my arms around. It’s kinda like being possessed. Over the next couple days the drawings started coming fast.

Here are some early-morning drawings of my face and hand, and then my body in dressing gown as a nod to Kirchner.

Here are some drawings of the “hardware”. The Chair and Easel. It wasn’t the easel I originally had in mind, but it was in the house, so I didn’t have to go out in the cold and dark to get the big one.

I also began working up the drawing for the nude model. You will notice that I gave her two left feet in this drawing. People insist on moving about, especially if they don’t know you’re drawing them. Anyway. I fixed that before it was too late.

Also my wife’s hair is pretty distinctive. It’s still quite dark on top, but the underneath has gone quite grey. She often pushes her hair back behind her ear, revealing a shock of white at the side. This is my quick drawing trying to capture the shape of that.

It was then a case of bringing all these parts together. Scaling the different elements, cutting them up and reassembling them. Here’s the version I traced on to the block. It was only at this stage that I noticed I’d got the feet wrong, so I corrected that on the block.

I always had in my mind that mirror image you get as the final print. As this was me as the artist, I wanted to ensure I’d be right-handed in the final print. So I made sure I drew my right hand in the mirror, switching between posing and drawing. Hence it’s a pencil in my hand in that original drawing, not a brush. Compositionally, everything else followed from that hand.

I’m pleased with the result. It is quite tense and awkward. not an easy, relaxed picture. Kinda like the process of making it.

Rugby Open 2020 update

Delivered “Love in an Age of Pestilence: Minuet” to Rugby Art Gallery this morning. They are going to hang the exhibition and aim to open as soon as government restrictions are eased. I think 16th December is the soonest this could happen, so it’s fingers crossed all round. There will be web/social media stuff happening too, so I’ll flag that as and when I know anything.

Update on 19th December. Restrictios are still in place, so no "live" exhibition until the new year if at all, really. Hope there will be pictures and stuff so you don't have to just take my word for it.