Zoe’s Blue Cat is currently living on the sitting-room mantel shelf.
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He sits opposite the articulated Welsh dragon given to me by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan.
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I think he looks as though the space was just waiting for him!
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Category Archives: Maquettes and Constructions
santa caterina dances
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Over at her blog site Zoe in Wonderland, Zoe Blue has been posting about the healing powers of music, illustrated with images of her maquette of Santa Caterina playing the fiddle as she dances ecstatically. Zoe was the very first visitor to the Artlog to write to me about the techniques of making maquettes, and although she was already confidently on her pathway to being a painter, I could see that the practice of making maquettes might serve her very well in compositional terms. She started hesitantly and I wondered whether she’d stick with the technique, but suddenly she was off like a racehorse, not only mastering the art of the maquette, but additionally using the paper figures to extraordinary effect as models for her paintings.
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Zoe absolutely ‘got’ the notion of the posable maquette as a tool to explore positive and negative shape, and almost overnight her paintings acquired an exhilarating compositional boldness. Moreover although the construction of her figures pretty much mirrors my own practice, Zoe has evolved ways of using them that are uniquely her own, with results that are most impressive in pictorial terms.
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So today I post images of Santa Caterina giving herself up to the power of the music and the dance. She positively crackles with life. Well done Zoe! (I have to say that Caterina is really working that hair and those heels! I’m betting she dances a smoking hot tango!)
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maquettes seen through a mist
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There are so many things to write about at the moment that I’m not quite sure where to begin. Let’s start with the rather nifty storage boxes I acquired yesterday on a shopping-trip with my friend Philippa in Cardiff. For too long my maquettes have been stuffed into large vintage box-files that need to be emptied in order to find anything. These new slim translucent boxes can hold 1 – 2 maquettes, and the contents can be immediately seen. I plan on getting a stack more of them so that my entire collection of maquettes can be properly housed. I love the way the figures look through the plastic. Dreamy!
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Above: seen through the bottom of a box, the backs of maquettes and the spread tails of the many ‘brads’ that joint them.
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Above: maquette for Equus (half horse/half man used on the cover of the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of the play) and the very first maquette I produced, a hermit made for The Temptations of Solitude in 2003.
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Above and below: two maquettes produced for the series of paintings I made on the theme of Saint George and the Dragon in 2007.
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Above: the Princess in her finery from The Soldier’s Tale.
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However the true purpose of the day was to source materials for Mari Lwyd puppet-building, something that Philippa had such an unerring instinct for that the trip was a triumph of hunter/gathering, and the work-table is now practically buckling at the legs under the weight of treasures I’ve returned with to Ty Isaf. (Brava, Philippa. You are a a star, and so is the arty/crafty scrapstore we visited in Cardiff, which turned up such a staggeringly good cache of unexpected materials!)
return to the mari lwyd
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With the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra performance of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale at the Hay Festival now behind us, and with the presentation to the production team of Mark Bowden’s music for The Mare’s Tale imminent (28th June) it’s time for me to submerge myself once more in all things Mari Lwyd. I have another puppet to build, one that must withstand a watery environment (more on that later) and so I’m now researching materials and techniques ready to start the process of making a Mari Lwyd of the type that so frequently appears in my drawings: a rampaging, anatomised quadraped. (See above)
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The form of the paper maquette (see examples above) has provided me with a fantastic starting point for visualising the Mari Lwyd, and it’s now decided that those ‘preparatory’ figures will be making appearances in The Mare’s Tale in pre-filmed rod-puppeteered sequences and as stop-motion animations. But now I have to produce a workable three-dimensional figure, and the starting place, as always for me, is in drawing. My desk right now looks more like some mad inventor’s workbench, with metal mesh, wire, epoxy-fillers, discarded vacuum-hose, flossing-tape and thin polypropylene sheets awaiting my scalpels, wire-cutters and modelling tools. This is all quite seat-of-the pants, so it’s just as well I find it stimulating to be in unknown territories.
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dance of death
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I posted here a few weeks ago about making a skeleton version of Joseph the Soldier for the scene in which the Devil comes to claim him.
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There’s nothing in the Soldier’s Tale libretto to tell us what Joseph’s fate is, beyond the fact that the Devil comes to claim him. In the animation I have him roasted by his captor’s fiery breath.
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It’s a grisly end, and one I afterwards felt uncomfortable about because it’s not a pleasant thing to commit a character you care a great deal about to being so cruelly done away with. Nevertheless, I stuck with the idea, and when I watched the scene at the Hay Festival, I was confident that it worked.
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At her Hills of Nottingham blog, Charlotte Hill has posted a story she’s written full of strange and haunting imagery, including that of a skeleton, and it’s rather lodged in my imagination. Charlotte explains that her story is a work-in progress, and so please bear that in mind should you read it. But whether in this early state or in a version yet-to-be-decided, there’s much to think about in her tale of an unfortunate girl consigned to a watery grave.
horse
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In the images above and below, workers in the Russian Republic of Tuva excavate fourteen sacrificed horses from a 2,700-year-old Scythian grave. The photographs are by Sisse Brimburg for an article in the June 2003 issue of National Geographic Magazine. This is a modest horse-sacrifice by Scythian standards, as excavations have opened graves containing herds numbering hundreds.
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I find the images chime with so many things that move me, and it’s undeniable that here’s the abiding visual theme that’s haunted my work as an artist almost from the beginning.
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Above: from the 1999 – 2001 series of work The Mare’s Tale.
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Above: from the Old Stile Press 2009 illustrated edition of Sir Peter Shaffer’s play Equus.
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Above: maquette for an animated sequence in The Mare’s Tale, a work for chamber-ensemble composed by Mark Bowden with a libretto by Damian Walford Davies, commissioned in 2012 by the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra. Rehearsals begin this August.
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Above: imagery for the MWCO production of The Mare’s Tale.
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Above: poster design for The Mare’s Tale.
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Above: Mari Lwyd puppet for the MWCO production of The Mare’s Tale.
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The Devil’s coach and horses from the MWCO 2013 production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. (The first performance is on the 28th of this month at the Hay Festival.)
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the princess dances…
… and I reference everything from classical ballet…
… to Berlin Cabaret…
… to the Danse Apache of Paris nightclubs.
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I guess once a choreographer, always a choreographer.
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She’s quite a gal!
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images and animation from the second day
You can see work from the second day of three spent composing images and creating animations for The Soldier’s Tale, at the following link.
Click HERE.
The animations have yet to be cut and edited correctly, but you’ll get a general impression. Our finished visual presentation is going to be a combination of animation and montage. This is an economic way to use movement in the storytelling without recourse to end-to-end animation, which would be visually exhausting with so much going on. In the montage sequences, we’re able to suggest animation cycles by employing sequential still images, allowing the eye to rest and affording the onstage ensemble and narrator a more controlled visual environment.
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It’s been exciting arranging the maquettes for the camera. Pete has a great eye for composition so as to create dynamic positive and negative spaces while retaining the narrative focus, and you’ll see in the examples shown at the link how appealing the montage sequences are going to be. I’m pleased too at how versatile the puppets are. There are just four maquettes of Joseph, showing him from the front, a three-quarter profile and a left and right profile, with one extra head for good measure. I meant to make an image of him from behind, but ran out of time. By swopping the heads between bodies, I’ve been able to greatly extend his expressive qualities, aided and abetted by the hats, of which there are three. Looking back over the work done on Tuesday, it’s quite impressive how much the little chap manages to achieve as an ‘actor’. My friend, artist Shellie Byatt, writes that she’s in love with him, and I begin to see why!
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aftermath
Above: all of the work laid out ready for packing.
Pete Telfer’s camera and lighting-rig have been removed, and the window-shutters thrown open to let in the sun. Since Monday our dining-room has been an animation studio. Anyone entering over the past three days would have found it a dark cavern but for the pools of brightness over the ‘slope-board’ serving as the makeshift animation-table. We’ve all edged our ways round tripods and piled furniture and lay-outs of maquettes being readied for scenes. There have been collisions that shifted the camera or wobbled the lights, and many a case of the animator’s shadow in frame, spoiling the shot. We’ve scrabbled around for tiny but vital ‘props’ that have disappeared under discarded maquettes and scenery. All the usual hazards of working in a confined space.
James Slater arrived to watch the proceedings, and before I knew it was on his knees assisting in the animating. During the ride in the Devil’s coach, he took over the coach with the Devil and Joseph inside it, leaving me to better concentrate on the two fully-articulated skeleton coach horses… one overlapping the other… that required all my concentration. And when the sequence was played back, my apprentice animator had completed his task beautifully. I would certainly not be able to stand on a podium and conduct an orchestra, but James-the-conductor took to animating like a duck to water! By midnight we’d got the last scene in the can, and we were done.
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Above: lettering for the opening credits.
There’ve been several moments of dark despair, and not a few of delight when all went according to plan, or even exceeded anticipation. Now there is the ‘putting together’ to be done, and for that we must decamp to an editing suite. It has been, as these things usually are, a kind of chaos out of which order must be made to emerge.
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Time to pack everything away. There’s an exhibition planned in 2015 of the artwork for both The Soldier’s Tale and The Mare’s Tale. But right now I intend a series of gallery paintings using The Soldier’s Tale as my theme, and the work done for the animation will kick start it. (The love-child, I think, of Otto Dix and Chagall, if you can imagine that!)
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Above: it takes many violins to make an animated film of The Soldier’s Tale!
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animation update
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This is a really quick one, to report that Pete the cameraman, and Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra director James Slater and I worked a flat-out fourteen hours today to complete all the photography and animation for The Soldier’s Tale. So weary was I by the end…. with every joint aching from crawling around on my knees all day… that when I animated the flames immolating poor Joseph, the horror of it all hit me quite hard and I almost blubbed. He’d performed so valiantly for three solid days… gallant little maquette… that I hated it when fate in the person of the Devil blasted him to kingdom come. (My fault too, because I chose to do it this way, to toughen up the ending and make it visceral. More usually in stagings of the piece the Devil just drags Joseph away.) Oh I am too tired to think straight any more, so I shall bid you all goodnight. The Artlog will rest tomorrow… as shall I… and I’ll be back on Friday with more news. Until then…
Poor little Joseph.
