the book is here

On Friday a van arrived from Butler Tanner & Dennis with multiple copies of ‘the book’ to go on to the National Library and the Martin Tinney Gallery. Another van took the main consignment to Lund Humphries for distribution. I am not the one who should write about it, and so I’ll draw the posts on this subject to a close here with the following thanks.

My thanks to Simon Callow, for his introductory chapter setting the the tone of the book with rich insight and infectious enthusiasm. He is always an inspiration.

I thank Andrew Green for his deeply mined explorations of landscape in my painting. We needed a writer knowledgeable in the history, the topography and the built heritage of Wales, and In Andrew we struck gold.

I thank Rex Harley who at the outset helped to conceive a plan for the monograph, and then produced a beautiful chapter on still-life and another on my work with The Old Stile Press. He also stood my corner when I declared that I didn’t want anyone to write about my life before I became a painter, though I was less happy when he and Peter elicited a rash undertaking from me that I’d come up with a short memoir to close the book. In hindsight I think they were right to do so, though there were times when I was out of sorts with both of them about it.

I thank Montserrat Prat for agreeing to write about my work on the Mari Lwyd series. She made cross-cultural connections and suggested possible influences that were spot on in every case. It was Montserrat who dredged memories from my childhood that set the Parthenon marbles at the heart of the work, a fact that had never consciously crossed my mind while working on the drawings, though the moment she spoke the words I knew she was right.

I thank Jacqueline Thalmann for bringing her expertise on the Christ Church fragments of a ‘Thebaid’ to the chapter on The Temptations of Solitude. We could have found no one better suited to the job of  putting my paintings in the historical context of what had inspired them, and she has done so most deftly.

I thank Marly Youmans for her extraordinary chapter Fire in the Labyrinth. It’s as though she opened a door into my head, walked in and made herself quite at home. I still can’t work out by what alchemy she has divined thoughts that I have never expressed in words. Her chapter reads like fiction, though it’s as close to the truth about painting as anything I’ve ever read.

I thank Anita Mills for her artist’s insight. (She is the only contributor who is a practising artist.) Anita meticulously analyses my drawn works but never makes the vivisectionist’s mistake of destroying them in the process. She is a marvel and I find she teaches wonderful and useful lessons about a process that for me is largely intuitive.

I thank Kathe Koja, another who has taken the back door into my head without me even noticing. (Interesting that like Marly, Kathe is a celebrated novelist.) Her chapter on maquettes is so far from what might, in lesser hands, have been an account of how I cut up paper. Instead she has conjured an uncannily accurate imagined version of  the dramas that clutter my head as I manufacture the puppets, and one day I’m going to make her tell me how she did that.

I thank Damian Walford Davies, who has written a chapter on poetry that is so ravishingly beautiful that already it has begun to influence what I plan to paint next. I can’t think of any praise for him higher than that.

Andrew and Peter Wakelin masterminded the book. Together they designed it and spent hundreds of hours finessing the content and layout. Peter edited it. I’ve often thought it just as well that these two are brothers, because otherwise either of them may have driven another collaborator mad in the pursuit of perfection. (Combined, I don’t mind telling you that they often nearly drove me to distraction.) But a glance at the finished book will show that all their efforts have produced something to be proud of, and I shall be forever grateful to them for the faith, endeavour and good judgement they’ve shown throughout the project. Peter, Andrew, my thanks to both of you for this monograph. It’s far more than I ever hoped it could be.

You can order the book from Lund Humphries HERE.