Woman with her head in a towel…

Or maybe it’s, “I’m washing my hair.”

This one’s a birthday card for my wife. Some time around Christmas she came downstairs after a bath with her hair bundled up in a towel-turban. She used to do post-washing wrapping like this and wander about the house a lot in the past. But I hadn’t noticed her do this for a while. Anyway. She was sat at her computer concentrating on something or other when I did a quick drawing.

With her birthday coming up I went looking for a likely drawing about a week or so ago and reworked the rough original to make a print. I think it is kinda like her, and captured in a very simple design. I took about a minute on the original drawing and then about a day, off-and-on, to get to the printed card.

Matisse woman

Here’s another naked woman on a postcard. This one is based on a couple of paintings by Matisse. It’s a pose he used several times. Matisse is a sensual painter, like Rubens. You want to touch, don’t you?
 

Because Matisse doesn’t burden his work with a wealth of detail, I didn’t plan this too much and just went for it.
 

The bedding proved to be the most problematic part of this one. I had to work it, and rework it, and rework it. My original plan was to have the bedding below/to the front of the woman, but then her upper arm read as part of a pillow. So I added the bit of pillow above/behind her arm which seems to make the arm read properly.

Still life with lovers

I’m returning here to the drawings I did back in 2019 in Eric Gaskell’s class. Back then, I used one as the basis for a linocut at a workshop of Eric’s that then got accepted for that year's Rugby Open exhibition. 

This particular arrangement has a convex mirror behind the skull and glass(es). In the original drawing there’s an outline of two people seated in the background. I quite liked having people there, but it seemed a bit purposeless. I felt I either had to make that part of the background more explicit or more uncanny. I had been reading a book about Edvard Munch and it was still lying at the side of the bed with one of the versions of the Kiss on the cover. That was what was needed, but not the naked one. The clothed version gave a more contrasty image. It carries its own uncanny baggage, too. Which I like.

I felt I needed to break up the black to the right of the lovers, so I just improvised something while channelling my inner Munch. The result ended up more like the Scream than I’d consciously intended, but I like it. It adds a level of anxiety that completes the whole, I think.

Ghostly Maenir

I felt that the original Maenir print didn’t achieve quite the vibe I wanted, but I thought recently there was maybe a smaller print in there, trying to get out. So I’ve brought her back for an experiment, printed against a roughly-cut and gnarled-up block, around 10”x8” in size.

I like the background block. There’s something that says pine forest to me, or some kind of mountain landscape maybe. Or pines on a moor. (It’s just occurred to me that pine moor is “Matsubara” – my favourite Japanese woodblock artist). A good place for this standing stone.

This rendition makes her more ghostly. And some of the early impressions came out even more so. She looms out of the subtle broken-up landscape, like out of a fog. Maybe she’s more like Kate Bush’s poor, dead Cathy here, “Heathcliff, it’s me, your Cathy, I’ve come home. I’m so cold. Let me in your window.”

Olympia

Another naked woman on a postcard.

I did a bit of organising of the big sheaf of art postcards we’d collected over the years. (Who knew we had so many Madonna and Child postcards?) Anyway, among the nudes/Venuses was the Venus by Titian in the Uffizi (I think it was previously called the Venus d’Urbino, so was probably in the hands of the Montefeltro family at some point). The painting was the inspiration for Manet’s Olympia, so I thought I’d do my own version.

The young woman in Manet’s painting looks like a girl I was at school with, so I’ve always felt a bit weird about it. Also her hand is definitely more “Keep Out!” than the Titian. So Titian it was. I thought I’d portray her with eyes closed here, putting her in her own internal world. Enjoying whatever fantasy is on her mind.