Portrait of the Artist with Five Fingers

 

I am drawn to drawing my own hands because they are so… handy. I began work on this one while waiting for a new tyre to be fitted on the car. These days, waiting rooms are empty of interesting folk to draw. So, your five-fingered friend. he never lets you down.

Invariably I draw my left hand. As the image is reversed in printing it, it comes out looking like my right anyway. If I need both hands, I usually draw my left hand twice and flip one of them.

But this time the two hands were different kinds of things. A picture of a hand, and a picture of a drawing of a hand. So I didn’t want them both looking like how I draw a hand. So I drew my left to stand in for my right hand as usual. Then I drew my right hand with my left. So the hand in the picture is the hand that drew the drawing of a hand in the picture. Or something. I think it’s kinda neat, anyway.

What did you do in the Corona Crisis, Daddy?

 

I’m getting prepared for this year’s Warwickshire Open Studios. I shall sign up whatever happens.

It has been a creative year for me and I think the impact of the coronavirus and government restrictions have taken my work in directions I hadn’t expected.

So here’s my first video for this year. It places some of the themes of my work in the context of our present malaise.

And to prove it...

 

Rugby Open 2020 has now been properly locked down past the scheduled closing date. But there is some online stuff beginning to happen.

 

 

Here’s a video of the exhibition with nobody there. You will spot my print around 30 seconds in.

Update on 7th January. They've added a nice online brochure in flipbook format and a form to vote for your favorite work. Both again on the Rugby Open 2020 page. And here's a direct link to the brochure you'll find me on page 18.

Update on 12th January. RAGM are keeping the exhibition on the walls until 17th April so will open it if-and-when they get the nod from government. Fingers crossed.

Death and the Bibliophile (book plate)

I don’t think I’ve ever lent a book and got it back. The only book I remember coming back was one I had given to somebody only to have it returned after their death. It bore an inscription to me on the fly leaf, so his executors gave it back to me.

I’ve always loved book plates. I like to see them in an old book, little memorials to previous owners.

Any book that I paste one of these inside is unlikely to get lent out. But maybe when the Davies Library is dispersed, people in the future can wonder about me. And the faint-hearted can worry that I may have cursed the book, wishing upon them a visit from Uncle Death himself.

I’ve been thinking about this image for about the last month. It started out with her facing forward and fainting away at Death’s touch. The composition was much more four-square and had something of a Jugendstil Death and the Maiden about it. I’ve come back to the idea off-and-on over the month and it has developed in a more expressionistic direction. Yesterday I felt I’d got the drawing of the reader right, flinching yet unwilling to be torn from the book. I’ve been drawing some of the Deaths from Holbein’s Dance of Death, and that’s where his vibe has come from. I like that he seems quite importunate, and maybe a bit lizardy.