Stop press!

 

Had a catastrophic failure of the home made press yesterday. The crossbar that passed under the bed split apart where it was bolted to the right-hand upright. So I spent the best part of the last day taking it apart and replacing the broken part with a more sturdy piece of wood.

This has resulted in the “headroom” between the bed and the plate being reduced by about 2”. On the down side I can’t get really thick things into the press, but on the plus side it takes fewer “pumps” per print.

I’ve tried it out by printing 20 book plates, and there seems no discernable difference from before. So all is looking good. I’ll try something larger today or tomorrow to be absolutely certain.

Tea card portrait

 

Whenever I attempt to draw myself, I am gripped by the existential question, “Who am I?” When I say, “myself” I mean my face, I have no such problem with my hands. It’s a hard question. The answer is more than the inventory, “Two eyes, middling brown; one lumpy nose…” There is obviously the question of character here, of the internal life, or the internal life presumed by others, a rather mercurial thing. Is the question more, “Who am I, right now?”

When I’m in front of a mirror and look, really look at this face opposite me, I’m not wearing an outdoor, public face. It’s my looking face, and I guess that would be quite a disconcerting face to wear when you’re out and about.

This little portrait, and the bigger “Portrait at 4am” are both winter portraits. In the dark, with harsh overhead lighting. My wife doesn’t see “me” in them, but I think there’s enough of the scrutineer here. It’s a look people don’t get to see that often.

This one, I guess because it’s smaller and simpler, is less scary than “4am”. It seems more laid back. Also it’s origin is an evening drawing, so maybe I’m feeling more relaxed. There are a couple of raggedy bits to this one that I’ve decided not to do anything about, because I think it’d change the vibe of the thing.

Around about when lockdown started, Asda stopped embossing their tea bag cartons. Since then I’ve been cutting them up and saving the fronts and backs. So I’m printing these little pictures on the reverse of these bits of card. It’s nice to repurpose things like this, and I can give them to people to remind them where to look.

Sacrament (Meditation)

 Blood. My wife says I’m accident prone. I’ve certainly spilled plenty of blood over the years. I’ve spilled blood doing the washing up and on the dance floor. I’ve spilled blood getting into a car and while walking along reading a financial report. So I’ve taken up an activity that requires using sharp tools. Though I’ve only managed to stab myself once during the last 18 months or so. Maybe I’m getting more careful, though I doubt that. Maybe this way is just too easy for the gods of Karma.

But remember. I bleed so you don’t have to.

Creation (Meditation)

Yet another Meditation. Though it’s a little off the beaten track for me, in terms of the activity depicted. It’s been a long time since I made anything actually 3-D. This print began with me trying to come up with something logo-ish for a local artist/maker group. I thought (still do) that hands in the process of making was the way to go.

As much as I like this one, I think it says more about me than the group. Though I tried to move away from the stuff I do, it's still me. 

I’m drawn to the “chiselled” effect you can get with wood or lino prints. Something Ernst Barlach achieved in his graphic work. I like it when the work bears the marks that say, “This was made with sharp tools.”

It was also important, I felt, to show the hands and head as different kinds of things. Hence the very intense striations that make up the face. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

I’ve got a little haiku to go with this one, too.

Slowly cut and pared, The pain of all creation. A new form is born.

Porthcawl: After the storm

It’s my Aunty J’s 80th birthday this week. So I’ve been floundering around for days trying to come up with an idea for a card. All kinds of things have surfaced in my head. She was the village carnival queen in the late 1950s. I also remember her coming home (in her early twenties?) with a meat tenderising hammer (WTF?) and telling me it’s what undertakers used to make sure you were dead. Freaked me out for weeks, that did.

Anyway, she has lived in Porthcawl for many years now. The town seems to be most famous these days for photographs of gigantic waves battering the sea front. (Well, there’s also the Elvis festival, but we won’t go into that) She’s not been very well recently, so I thought a rainbow after the storm would hit the right note.

It’s also my little homage to Erich Heckel, whose wee print “Regenbogen” has recently been added to the Davies collection.

Lovers (Valentine's Day card)

I don’t always remember to make a Valentine’s Day card for my wife, but we’ve been sorting through drawers and stuff, so we’ve recently come across some of the cards I made years and years ago. I’d got a little notice this year, so I thought I’d sneak a printed card in. I’ve got a long list I keep with ideas for prints and I’d written “Lovers/Liebespaar” on it at some point, so that was the subject matter taken care of.

I’ve stolen the composition from Klimt. It would have taken me too long to work up my own composition, so with a bit of judicious cropping and tweaking, this got close to what I had in mind.

The Klimt original is one of his preparatory drawings for his Beethoven Frieze in the Secession building (Strobl 3464). The drawing shows the couple lying down and having sex, but I loved her hands so much I had to use it. Hands were a central element for me, as I’ve been using them so much this past year, Also I saw a short film a few days ago – it’s called Egon - a modern dance interpretation of the untimely death of Klimt’s protegee Egon Schiele. There’s a really funny bit in it about Schiele’s tendency to strike a pose with his hands. Anyway, I’ve put a link to the film here (as you might suspect with Schiele, there’s lots of nudity).

Sleeping Woman

I think she looks a bit like the woman who encounters Death in my book plate. I don’t know who she is, she just wanders around my head with no clothes on.

When we were looking at one of Cezanne’s big paintings of bathers the other day, my wife got annoyed at him because he didn’t treat the women in the painting as human. There wasn’t any sympathy or connection there. If Cezanne were alive today I think he’d be diagnosed as autistic. He certainly had difficulties connecting with other people. He didn’t like being touched. So I think that for him people were just a particularly problematic element of the landscape. Especially women with no clothes on. But “mythological” naked women were up there at the pinnacle of the artistic canon. So it was important (to his mind) to paint them.

So. Even though this woman is a figment of my imagination, I wanted her to be human. I wanted her arm to fit properly on her body. I wanted the viewer to be able to invent a story about why she is sleeping there, naked.

This is a card-sized print. I could print them on postcards, too. Which would be kinda traditional. I’ve also got some greeting cards with little windows cut in the front, so I can also do a “coy” version. Or is it a peep-show version?

Meditation: Sumi

It is nearly a year since the idea came to me that the activities of my hands were meditations. Or at least something to meditate upon. I didn’t give it much thought, it just seemed “right” at the time. But every once in a while, when I am making art or doing some chore, my hands make me aware of myself as a physical being. And most importantly of how physical the processes of thought are. How embodied they are.

So. Sumi. Black ink. That despoilation of the blank paper. The joy of cursive script. Here’s a haiku about it:

Black ink laid starkly. Outline of a lover’s touch, staining the white sheets.