Your Country Needs You (Amelia)

 

Whenever I have an idea for a print, there is always a wee small voice telling me more-or-less insistently that I shouldn’t do it. But I always persevere and plug on until I’ve got something. It’s nice to get some real, physical artwork of Amelia done. In these days of AI, I relish doing something with my clumsy human hands.

I don't usually venture into such an overtly politial arena as this, but I think it's a message for everyone, especially young men. I feel at least partly responsible for the moral cess-pit that this country has become, but I'm too old now to do much about it. Apart from this. It's young men who will carry the burden of rebuilding the place into somewhere they can stand tall. And win their own real-life Amelia.

It's currently a print on nice paper, but I might do a card version in just purple and black. That's the idea, anyhoo. 

Green Room, Pink Man

 

 Another print that started out as one of August's life drawings. The original drawing was done quickly with brush and ink after I had worked the pose to death over the previous hour or so. It was like I had internalised the essence of the picture and could now splurge it on to the paper. I kept fairly close to the drawing for the print, except for the plant which is now far more luxuriant than the sorry specimen suffering in a school art-room. I also wanted to print it in green and blue, and jokingly call it "Green Man". But that didn't work. So pink and green. Meat and veg, as it were. The yellow stripe refers to the suboptimal lighting in the room, with the summer sun shining over the model's shoulder, and the rather poor yellow light in the room.  But it also, I think, helps to balance the picture somewhat.

I arrived at Green Room, Pink Man as a basic descriptive title (which I find often works), but I feel it also has an implication of "The Green Room" as a somewhat debauched space and that "Pink Man" is an assertion worth making in these identitarian days.