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.

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.