In the picturesque chaos of the ‘Battery’ (my attic studio, so named because of the pipistrelle bats I share it with) I occasionally find some avalanche of papers newly toppled from a once orderly stack. In this way barely remembered drawings come to light, and drawings remembered but long considered lost. Every time this happens I think to myself ’I really must get this place sorted out.’ But life goes on, and there are always more pressing matters to attend to, so the piles languish and occasionally topple, and nothing gets sorted out at all.
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The two drawings below were made in preparation for the Old Stile Press 1998 edition of The Affectionate Shepheard by the poet Richard Barnfield. (1547 – 1627) It was my first major undertaking for the press and was a close collaboration with Nicolas Mcdowall, who designed and printed it, and Frances McDowell, who made the beautiful paper used throughout. In the finished edition the types were printed in Bulmer, but in some of my preparatory drawings I played with the idea of writing the text in longhand.
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Above: preparatory drawing made with glass pen and ink, wax crayon and watercolour.
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The notion behind my decorations for the book was not to directly depict Barnfield’s cast of gods, goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, but to conjure them as though through a performance of his narrative given by a group of ‘players’ equipped with makeshift costumes and props. And not a ‘public’ performance either, but something rather more private, very likely involving quantities of alcohol and resulting in not a few of the participants falling out of their clothes! Hence the allegorical ‘Pride’ of the poem, in the drawing is shown as a youth with strap-on wings, a stage-helmet and very little else. Another version of the subject is reversed and more briefly drawn, and must be a try-out for the finished decoration which had to be ‘engraved’ back-to-front on specially-coated glass before being made into a relief-block ready for printing. I strove for loosely-drawn images even though the ‘engraving’ process was resistant to capturing flowing line. But despite the challenges of the technique, printed onto Frances’ paper the overall effect is rather silvery and delicate, the rippling surfaces catching the light and exaggerating the fragility of the image. Quite different to the original drawing, but appealing nevertheless.
Above: drawing made with glass pen and ink and wax crayon.
Below: the relief-printed image as it appears in the book.
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such a delicate, flowing style–and i love the story of the day you made that fateful wing…
The flowing lines are so different from the angular forms, flat planes and maquette-based poses I associate with your work. Was there a point when you made a conscious decision to shift your style, or did it evolve more gradually?
Hi Dean.
Two things have had a great bearing on my work. I’m both self taught and I came late to my career as a painter. I can see in retrospect that these two ‘drivers’ made me quite rigorous in the processes I put myself through. I felt that I had a lot to learn, and I wanted to be sure that I had all the skills in place so that I’d never struggle with expressing myself, leastways not on any technical level. Drawing the human figure interested me… after all, I’d been a choreographer… and I found I had an aptitude for it. However, I also found that I was dissatisfied with the results. No matter how beautifully I drew, I felt that I wasn’t able to express my feelings about the world through that alone. In fact the more I refined my skills, the further away I drifted from what I was trying to say.
So I knew changes needed to be made, but I knew too that they’d have to evolve. I didn’t want to ‘assume’ a style of working, not even from those who I most admired. Change had to come from within.
I was working on the series The Temptations of Solitude when I first made a paper model by way of trying to work out a problem. The ‘model’ was in fact a paper wing for an angel, and I made it quickly and to the scale of the painting I was working on. I just held it against the painting and moved it around, to see which position would be best for what I planned to paint. But it wasn’t working and I threw the paper wing on the floor. Two weeks later I was still struggling with the painting when my eye fell on the discarded wing, now crumpled and flattened under the easel. Something clicked for me. I picked it up and suddenly realised that I liked it better with its distortions and angularity. Next came a maquette of a saint, and I didn’t even really know what I was trying to do or how I would use it. But use it I did, and thereafter I gradually evolved a process of working that involved these stages:
a) life-drawing in the studio… which for me was pretty much business as usual.
b) using the life-drawings as the starting point for a maquette.
c) using the maquette as the model for many quickly made preparatory sketches.
d) using those sketches to assemble my compositions.
It’s hard to explain why this process works for me, but it seems that when cut free from the tyranny of anatomy and the life-model, I’m better able to marshall forms and colours to build my ideas expressively. I acknowledge that I get a lot from having a model in the early stages, but at some point the model becomes a distraction, almost like a whirlpool that I get sucked down. And so I never work directly from a model to the canvas. The model is always an initial stage, and then comes the maquette, and it’s the limitations of the maquette that seem to work best for me, because then I’m thinking about where the sharp angle of an elbow should be to best serve the composition in formal terms, rather than putting the elbow only where the live model can get it! Does that make sense?
That makes perfect sense!
I wouldn’t have expected that a live model was still part of your process, but it does make sense now that you explain it…. The flowing lines of the illustration is not so far away from your more recent work after all.
I totally get how moving beyond what the model can “do” at a certain point would set you free to think more formally about composition.
I enjoyed reading about your moment of discovery with the discarded wings. What a fateful day!
I also was inspired by your comment about looking within for direction rather than to pre-defined styles. We can all learn a lesson there.
A model is occasionally though not always a part of the process these days. I’ve used two in particular: my partner Peter and a friend, Ben Koppel. Neither sit for me any more, though so familiar are they both that their likenesses creep into my paintings without me even trying. Also, I’m constantly looking at people when I’m out and about and the things I learn get carried back to the studio. Sometimes I spot someone in the street who has a quality that I can use. A couple of years ago I saw a ‘dustman’ (I’m sure there’s a proper word for them these days, but I don’t know what it is) and he was so extraordinary looking that I almost followed him. (I could so easily be a stalker!) He was tall and rangy with a predator’s loping gait. His head was shaved but for a Mohican crest, and from beneath the top of his t-shirt tattooed tendrils curled up his neck. He looked a bit fierce and unpredictable… something about that hunter’s gait… and so I didn’t approach him to ask if he’d model for me. (I have been known to approach total strangers.) But back in the studio I held his likeness in my mind while I worked, and eventually he became THIS. The drawing isn’t particularly a likeness of him, but it carries a sense of him.
So real people lie behind, and are sometimes… in the case of Peter… deeply embedded in the paintings. Imagination plays a big part in my work of course, but the starting point is always a reality, both physically in the form of the model, and perhaps more importantly, emotionally, in my response to him.
Observation is the foundation of everything. Sometimes the observation is first-hand, with the jug, dog, tree, man… or whatever… in front of me as I try to capture what I see. But observation can be a more inward, creative process too, where the observations have been stored in the head as memory, and the interpretive processes can take over.
Phil is so right. This is a beautifully fine drawing. Such delicate lines in the finished print. I’ve become a bit obsessed with glass recently so find the idea of making a print from a glass engraving very intriguing. I’m also thinking about your bats! We have them here but they are under fascia boards etc and we never see them indoors. Are your bats literally in the room with you or just snuffling about above the ceiling? I don’t mind hearing them moving about above me but I would not be keen if they were too visible.
I’m glad you like the drawing, and the print that evolved from it. It was all gruelling work. The technique was so alien to me and I wasn’t at all confident I’d be able master it and deliver images that would serve the text. It all came out OK in the end, but I was uneasy throughout the long period of working on the book. (And my fingers bled a lot from all the glass plates I managed to break while engraving.)
The bats are above the studio ceiling, though this being an old house and full of cracks and fissures, they often come out to play. Being such frequent visitors to our living-spaces, we have strategies to encourage them out again. We turn off the lights, open a window and then vacate the room, closing the door so that they don’t fly off elsewhere in the house. I counted the colony a couple of years ago, and we had three hundred. The main space they visit is the studio as they’re directly over it, and I must say that the bat-shit gets everywhere. But I rather love them, and don’t mind sharing. Bit of a privilege to live in such close contact with nature. These are not rats or squirrels eating the electrical wiring. The bats do no harm. And on such occasion that I have to rescue one by hand, close up they are the dearest little things, though they sometimes hiss at me like enraged vampires. Pipistrelles are the smallest of our native bats, but they have great spirit!
Without actually saying it, it was the bat shit that was uppermost in my mind Clive. I just imagined it all over your drawings! That is some colony you have there. We only have about half a dozen solitary male bats here now , all with their own particular favourite place. We used to live in an old chapel with a colony of about 100 and I only know that because my husband used to record them for the BCT. You are right about having them being a privilege. I’m a great believer that if bats or swallows choose your home to share it’s a sign of good fortune.
Agreed, Lesley. Good fortune indeed. When we first viewed this house the owner showed us around. I asked what the thirty-foot taped-together-bamboo pole stored in the barn was for, and pointing to the eaves he explained it was to knock down the nests of any swallows that attempted to build there. I was not impressed.
Every year since we’ve lived here the swallows have returned and nested in the barn and stable, though never until last year under the eaves. Now there’s a single nest there and this year I hope its builder will return, and maybe more nests might appear to keep it company. A bit of bird-shit on the terrace is a small enough price to pay for the delights of having those aerial acrobats entertaining us throughout the summer months.
Bat-shit on my drawings. It’s a fact. But you know, it’s dry and brushes off, and I don’t find it repellent. They’re not like mice, who pee everywhere. There is an odour to the colony in summer… or more precisely to the guano… which is slightly bitter. But it’s not offensive. What I find offensive are the needlessly ‘fragranced’ products we’re enjoined to purchase to keep our homes ‘fresh’! The endlessly advertised room-fresheners, toilet-blocks, fabric ‘softeners’ and scented cleaning products. I eschew all of them. We never use perfumed products in the toilets here, not least because of our septic tank. But we do use elbow-grease, and we clean everything regularly and thoroughly. (Plus a box of matches on the loo shelf for the occasional odorous discharge!) Sickly chemical simulations of pine forests and fruit compote are not for us. We polish our furniture with bees-wax, clean the windows with balled-newspaper and warm water (absolutely no smears) and wipe the soot inside the glass of the wood burner with balled and dampened newspaper dabbed with the wood-ash. (It takes off even the most baked-on soot.) In summer I dry our scent-free laundry on the box-hedge, and everything smells pretty wholesome after that. Bat-shit holds no terrors for me. I can live with it. Aerosol room-freshener, on the other hand, makes me want to biff!
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Wow, your drawing is awesome Clive, delicate and beautiful but very alive – and these were just buried in a stack of papers?!!! The final image looks gorgeous on that lovely paper
One of the things that happened on this project, was that because the engraving was so difficult for me… I’d had no previous experience of the technique… I made huge numbers of preparatory drawings so that my hand would be sure when it came to working on the glass plates. As a result my drawing improved no end during that year, and the experience really brought home to me the value of repetition in honing drawing skills. At the end of the project there were hundreds of drawings, some quite brief and others more fully worked, and though many have sold during the intervening years, there still seem to be rather a lot of them lying around.
The habit has stuck, and I endlessly repeat drawings in the process of getting a subject well under my belt. When something is new to me I make drawings that are carefully observed, but once I’ve understood what I’m looking at and can draw it from memory, then I can riff on the theme and everything becomes more fluid and creative.