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.

Self Portrait at 4am

Since the clocks changed this Autumn, I’ve been ignoring the rest of the world and living in my own time zone. Time for me is eternally “Summer”. So 4am is only getting up a little early for me.
 

I’m always at my best in the mornings. It’s the time to plug away at something before the necessities of the day intervene. So here I am at my peak. In the dead zone between night and day. In the dead zone between Christmas and New Year.  I did a rough pencil drawing in the morning of December 29th that I thought looked promising. Next day I did a brush and ink version based on that. I then prepared a block and traced the image on to the block and inked it. But I wasn’t happy with it so I wiped it off. Next morning I stood back in front of the mirror. And using the ghost of the ink and carbon as the structure, I looked into the mirror for the highest highlights and cut them into the block. Being early morning in winter, I am entirely artificially lit by the LED spotlights in the kitchen. It’s a stark look.
 

Pretty much all the work was done in the hours between 4am and 8am over those 3 days.
 

I felt I needed a self portrait to face 2021. Last year was a year of growth and development for me. At Rugby Open 2019 I felt I needed a “body of work”, and I arbitrarily decided that that meant I needed around 35 images to my name. That’s pretty much what I did during 2020, and I’m really happy with how they all went. Last January I did a little self portrait using nasty dried-out old lino. So this one asks, “After all that, where am I now?”

Year of the Ox/Europa and the Bull

I thought I’d get in early with a card to celebrate Chinese New Year 2021. I didn’t have any time to think about it last year.

The impending year is Year of the Ox, but I’ve stretched it to Europa and the Bull for the forthcoming arrival of Brexit, too. A kind of message to my friends in the EU saying, “don’t get carried away by the Bull.” I know what I mean, anyway.

The Davies Collection contains a woodcut print, Europa and the Bull by Gustav Heinrich Wolff. He used the black bull/white woman motif, but in that print Europa looks much more up for it than old Zeus. When I first thought of doing this, I’d got one of Albrecht Dürer’s Eves in mind, though she turned out to be more frontal than I wanted. So I plugged away trying to get the angle right, and the arm and hand, and the turn of the head. The bull/ox shaped up very quickly, and appeared almost fully formed at the start.

I’m really pleased with the composition. The circularity of the arm leading to the bull’s body, turned back up by the horns, through her body back to the arm. There’s a kind of Yin and Yang thing going on, too. And the horn pointing at her crotch says, “Danger!”

I think I shall print some cards like this, then remove the year for more general use….

Schrödinger’s Exhibition

Seeing that I now have a picture on the wall in an art gallery, but nobody’s allowed to see it, it is simultaneously Art and Not Art. I didn't think I did conceptual stuff...