Today I’ve been completing Gawain’s armour, layering in the green belt of the wife of Bertilak de Hautdesert… a significant gift from the married woman to the handsome young knight… that he wears tied as a sash across his chest.
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The nick to his neck was healed by now;
thereabouts he had bound the belt like a baldric -
slantwise, as a sash, from shoulder to side,
laced in a knot looped below his left arm,
a sign that his honour was stained by sin.
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From Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(Faber and Faber, 2007)
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Above: on my desk birds and flowers are being assembled ready for composing the foliate ground behind Gawain.
Basically, I am full of wonder, Clive.
This is stunningly beautiful.
The armour is strong-looking and metalic somehow (how did you DO that without resorting to reflections or rivets, etc? Very taken with this piece.
yes, i am astonished by that metal-effect, too. i have been grappling with armour-representation, and have found it absurdly difficult
Paul, Zoe, I’m not sure whether I can account for why the armour is working without modelling and reflections. The most likely reason must be that because the notion of armour is so familiar to us, then the lack of those things doesn’t signify very much. The eye simply takes in that helmet shape, and wham… the brain fills in what’s missing. Abstraction can work in this way. Simplified shapes suggest ideas, and the viewer immediately begins to understand the pared-back visual language.
In recent years anyone watching will have seen my work move away from the more painterly techniques of those early still-life works when I was so in love with deep shadow, lustre and gleam… and the capacity of paint-strokes to capture those qualities… to being more interested in shape, pattern and flattened space. This portrait of Gawain continues the move away from my earlier preoccupations as a painter. I wanted too to express the idea of the model’s white skin, without moving down the route of the pre-Raphaelites absorption with beauty married to preternatural pallor. The technique here is very simple, essentially using the unpainted paper to carry the idea, though again the effect seems to work.
It’s a strange business, this, making sense of the world through the medium of paint. I don’t think I’ll ever grow weary of finding new ways to see.
his armor is fantastic!! and the birds are so beautiful…