capturing peter

From the moment I began to paint, my partner Peter’s likeness has been present in my work. Occasionally I’ve been unconscious of using him, and it was friends who first pointed out he was there in the wrestling angel of The Temptations of Solitude, though burlier in the paintings than in life, and shaved bald. Peter has never subscribed to the theory that the angel is him, but whatever was going on in my head when I was making the paintings, it’s clear it’s him.

The Comfort of Angels Attending the Dying.

…

The Man Who Lived in a Tree.

…

Struggle.

…

He was the model for Bluebeard when I was compiling an early illustration portfolio, painstakingly made as a pointillist drawing with a rapidograph pen. This time I reinvented him as darkly sensualist, a Russian oligarch in furs and silk cravat.

…

When I illustrated Equus for the Old Stile Press edition of the play (2009) I cast Peter as the psychiatrist Dysart, though for the longest time he had no idea I was using his likeness as I somehow neglected to tell him. It came as a bit of a surprise for  him when he found out, and it has to be said he wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea.

Above: a lost study of Peter made for Equus. I have no idea where it is, which is a shame as I think it rather good. I like the faint image of a ghostly horse looking over his shoulder.

…

…

Above: two studies of Peter as Dysart, referencing the psychiatrist’s dream that he’s trapped in a horse’s head, bridled with a bit clamped between his teeth.

…

Above: the image as it finally appeared in the book.

…

Many studies of Peter were made using conté pencil against  a red oxide ground. Some of the original drawings were included as ‘extras’ in the special boxed-editions of the book, of which there were ten produced.

…

…

Above: Peter on his old National Library of Wales identity card. I didn’t know him when the photograph was taken, though I’ve  conjured something of his appearance at that time for many paintings. Even the pudding-basin haircuts of the following images are based on the fact that his hair was cut in the style when he played King Henry V in a school play.

…

Saint Kevin

…

Saint Kevin

…

Saint Francis (Detail)

…

Angel Gabriel (Detail)

…

Quite a lot of mileage out of a single model!

questions and answers

Flowering Nest

…

Occasionally a question posed in a private correspondence provokes an explanation about how I present my work. Rebecca Verity, who lives in the States, owns a preparatory Saint Kevin drawing I made. She asked me what I meant by the term ‘curator speak’, used disparagingly in an earlier e-mail to her, and I answered the question, though I shan’t share my reply here. But this led me on to the matter of my titles and the lack of explanations in them, and how I see their function in relation to my work.

Rebecca. ‘What is this curator-speak which you so despise?  Is it (I ask in a very small voice) when the curator tells you all about a piece, the stories behind it and such?  Because (I say in a still smaller voice) I really like that.  Having been raised culturally illiterate, I love learning about paintings and the artists who created them.  Camille on Her Death Bed, for instance – is just weird and unnerving, until you know the story of Monet and his wife, and hear his account of painting it, and then it is still perhaps unnerving, but also heartbreaking and perplexing and challenging.’

And I always go and research your saints; the stories of their lives make the paintings so much more thought provoking then if they’re just unknown figures.  

Clive. ‘Never fear, what you’re talking about is a quite different thing to the despised ‘curator speak’, and of course can be helpful, though with my paintings I prefer explanatory text panels to be placed some distance away, because I want eyes on the images and not on any words. But the fact that when confronted with one of my paintings you go off to do some research, is heartening to me, because that’s exactly the kind of curiosity I aspire to provoke. When my ‘saints paintings’ appear in galleries, often with their slightly elusive titles that don’t explain the events depicted, the absence is because my job is to ask questions, not to provide immediate explanations. My hope is that the susceptible viewer  will go away and think on what’s been represented, perhaps to look for answers elsewhere. The important thing when seeing a painting for the first time is not the specific, as in ‘this is a representation of the Irish Saint Kevin in his cell with the blackbird of legend’, but rather the sense of a non-specific, universal encounter between man and beast that has a mystery at its heart. In many ways it’s unimportant who is represented or what event is described in the image. What matters is that the viewer be allowed to think and then draw a conclusion, and afterwards to explore elsewhere if moved to do so. The work is intended to be the first crumb in a trail that leads away to other, and perhaps even more interesting discoveries.’

 

I should add that there is an exception with regard to my aversion to text panels in proximity to my paintings, inasmuch that when a panel holds a poem, then the proximity is a good thing. I don’t see poems as being ‘explanations’, but companion works.

…

Postscript: Sometimes the comment boxes at the Artlog get to be more interesting than the posts.  That’s proved to be the case with this one, and so if you’ve the time, do scamper along to see if there’s anything to interest you down there.

haunted

Kevin and the Sunflowers

2009 – Acrylic on Panel – 62 x 59 cm

Private Collection

…

I’ve long been making works about Saint Kevin and the Blackbird, and though I regularly set aside the theme as others take priority at the easel, I have yet to feel that I’m done with the subject. Kevin haunts me and there’s no getting away from him. Over the past weeks new ideas about the anchorite saint and the trusting little hen-blackbird have again been absorbing me. I’ll be posting shortly about new paintings that are in development, and in preparation for those, today I’ve compiled a series of images by other artists and illustrators… found during a trawl of Google…  who’ve been drawn to the story.  Wherever possible I’ve attributed the artists.

…

Saint Kevin and the Blackbird in a 13th century manuscript.

…

Saint Kevin’s Bird by Leo Higgins.

…

Artist unknown.

…

Artist unknown.

…

…

Two images of Saint Kevin by printmaker Catherine Ryan.

…

Illustration by Doug Montross.

…

Aviaries by Yvonne C. Murphy, with a cover image taken from my Saint Kevin and the Blackbird painting Paper Garden.

…

Paper Garden

2011 – Acrylic on Panel – 31 x 63 cms

Private Collection

the animalarium

I suspect that most illustrators who occasionally  visit  here will know Laura Ottina’s magnificent online source of visual reference regarding all things zoological in the world of art and design. Her Animalarium is my first port of call whenever I feel the urge to see what’s best in book illustration and graphic design, and so I feel it a great honour for my work to have been included in her November post on the subject of Friends and Feathers. Do take a look at her site but be prepared to linger and to explore. I never get away from there in a hurry!

at the martin tinney gallery

Held

2011 – Conté pencil and acrylic on Arches paper – 56 x 76 cm

Sold

at the martin tinney gallery

Nest

2011 – Conte pencil and acrylic on Arches paper – 57 x 53 cm

Sold

held: from start to finish

Held

2011 – Acrylic and Conté pencil on Arches paper – 56 x 76 cm

The sketch from which the drawing started.

All the works from this ‘Saints’ series shown over the past few months on the Artlog, will be offered at my next Martin Tinney Gallery exhibition.

foliate skin II

An interrupted day, and so not quite done yet. The nest and the saint’s left hand are to be completed tomorrow. But for those of you keen to see how things have progressed, here is a detail of the area I’ve been working on. If you compare this with the image I posted yesterday, you’ll see that the tonalities of the face have been adjusted and the tattoos tinkered with until I was satisfied. A few extra oak leaves have floated down too. More tomorrow.

foliate skin

Philippa’s photograph of the mechanical digger (see last post) has switched a light on in my head, and one of the results is that the title of the Kevin and the Blackbird drawing currently in progress has now been changed from Empty Nest to Held. This afternoon I had a good session that saw work on the saint’s tattooed torso move forward significantly, and with luck I may well complete the drawing tomorrow. Here’s how it was looking at close of business today.

The saint’s tattoos in this drawing are quite unlike the lanceolate leaves and softly flowing tendrils of the last one, in which there was a graceful aspect to the inked pattern. Now the saint’s body seems a war-zone of aggressively thorny growth, as though he’s marked not by benign nature, but a natural world full of pain and chaos.

Sometimes a drawing or painting just has to find its own way, and so it is with this one. In 2009 in the first work of the series, I painted Kevin as a man almost crucified by the agonising task of supporting the bird’s nest, his thrust-out arm visibly straining with the effort. In the later works I eschewed that approach, and instead the saint cradled the nest in table-top still-lfe landscapes-in-miniature. Now the ideas have further evolved, and Kevin once again is showing signs both of mental strain and the privations of the hermit’s life. Nature is ultimately cruel, and in protecting the nest and its occupants from the worst of it, perhaps the saint has absorbed everything that scratches and strangles, taking the blows for the blackbird and her tender young while they are at their most vulnerable.

held

While out and about with her camera, my friend Philippa Robbins caught sight of something that reminded her of me. A thousand people would have walked past and not made the connection, but Philippa is a painter and her eye misses nothing. The detail beneath her photograph is from my painting Kevin and the Sunflowers. That should explain everything.

Thank you Philippa for taking the photograph and then sending it to me. I love the fact that you spotted the digger and immediately recognised that I would relish an image of it! By coincidence, here is the drawing (or rather a detail from it) that I’m currently working on!