Done!
Fine-liner pen and brush drawing for K is for Knight (based on a Sicilian marionette) and its preparatory sketch.
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So the Alphabet Primer is at long last finished. As with all projects, it’s turned out part failure and part success. Part experiment with new objects and part celebration of objects I love and draw regularly. Bits of it I greatly like and others I’d happily jettison, or at least try again. It started out a celebration in simple line drawings of objects, shapes and ideas that appealed to me.
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I would have liked to have kept it that way throughout, but the fact is I just couldn’t find enough objects of equal simplicity… and that I wanted to draw… to cover every letter of the alphabet. With more preparation and with time to collect ideas I probably could… and at some point very likely will… pull off that particular trick, because I think it would make a lovely, contemplative thing.
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At one point I wanted to make many dis-assembling images, as with A is for Anatomy. That too would make an interesting stand-alone primer. But it didn’t happen here, as it would have taken far too long to complete.
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Making words out of collage with papers that I’d painted in acrylic took me down another route, because the papers gradually transmigrated from letters to the objects. Sometimes I was able to keep things simple, as with this collage of an oval box at Penparc Cottage. (The box was originally a gift from Rex Harley, and it contained pralines. After they’d been eaten I painted the box the way you see it, and ever since it’s been called ‘Rex’s Box’. A tiny thing, the box has appeared in many of the ‘Penparc’ paintings.)
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But then I’d get carried away and images would become dense with ink and cut shapes, about as far away as could be imagined from the simple line drawings I’d initially set out to make.
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Don’t get me wrong. All these approaches have their merits, and I know that many of you who visit here have expressed which of the letters are your favourite images, But it’s made this particular Alphabet Primer a more mixed-bag than I’d anticipated at the outset. I see too it’s reflected my moods, sometimes sunny and light-hearted…
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… but occasionally dark and turbulent.
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No doubt I could have planned it better than this ride on a horse that sometimes ambled along happily, but spooked at intervals to carry me off at breakneck speed to places I frankly hadn’t planned on visiting. Peter says he thinks the book hangs together very well. He talks of a commercial edition, though I think that unlikely. I feel the strongest aspect of the primer is as hybrid object, a book/artwork that lends itself to display in many and varied configurations.
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I’ll be sorry to see it go and have no idea when it will return home again. However when it does, no doubt with benefit of distance from the creative process, I’ll be better able to judge it.
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I have other things to be getting on with now, but a return to the art of the Alphabet Primer is definitely on the cards.
