chronology of a painting

Simon Davies’ drawing of Christ Writes in the Dust seemed familiar to me, and sent me back to my archive where I discovered preparatory studies for the foreground figures that I’d completely forgotten about. In this post I’ve tried to insert them into the chronology of Christ Writes in the Dust, as I recall it.

The first drawings done for the painting explored ideas for the woman. Almost from the start I made the decision to have her bent double with her wrists bound, led to the place of execution by a tether around her neck.

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The next stage was to make a fully worked up grisaille version to show to the Trustees of the Methodist Collection.

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Much later I made a similar grisaille image of Christ. There were no preparatory drawings for it, because I used a maquette to work out the position of the figure.

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The maquette was one made originally for my series of paintings The Temptations of Solitude.

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Drawings made at the hilltop village of Montclar in Catalonia became the setting for the event.

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The final stages of preparation were these sketches made for the foreground figures. I’d forgotten about them until Simon’s picture jogged my memory and sent me off on a search. They’d been stored in the wrong box-file, and so took some finding among  drawings dating back over many years.

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There were no preparatory drawings made for the overall composition until I laid it out in white Conté crayon directly onto the panel, undercoated in my usual red oxide. I began with the landscape at the top edge, using it to work out my ideas for the palette. Blues, turquoises and yellows predominate.

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You can see the finished painting HERE. (Sorry Mathijs!)

simon davies and his drawing of ‘christ writes in the dust’

Christ Writes in the Dust, as drawn by Simon Davies

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Detail from my painting of Christ Writes in the Dust.

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Simon Davies, who is eight years old, saw Christ Writes in the Dust when it was recently exhibited in Chester, and he made a drawing of it. For comparison I’ve cropped a photograph of the complete painting, so that you can appreciate how well he selected the most significant elements of the composition, the ones that pretty comprehensively carry the story. I’m hugely impressed both by his draughtsmanship and his ability to capture the quality of the movement. He’s understood and deftly reproduced the way the woman’s weight has been awkwardly pitched forward as she fights to retain her balance on her kitten-heels, and he’s perfectly caught the stance of the man pulling on the rope-halter, back bent double and arms crooked.

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This can’t have been an easy composition to decipher. The figures are in complicated positions both anatomically and in relation to each other. But  Simon has cut straight to the emotional heart of the subject, and everything that’s needed to decode it is right there in his cropped version, powerfully yet economically rendered. I think this little drawing is a masterwork.

My thanks to Simon and to his parents for allowing the drawing to be reproduced here, and to Simon’s teacher for having been my contact in the arrangements. My gratitude also to Andrew Herbert from the Wesley Church Centre in Chester, for having hosted the exhibition and for alerting me to Simon’s drawing in the first place.

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christ writes in the dust:

• Christ Writes in the Dust: The Woman Caught in Adultery, commissioned from me for the Methodist Collection of Modern Art, was unveiled at the Barber institute in Birmingham on Tuesday. Those who had gathered for the occasion were warmly welcomed by the Director of the Barber, Dr Ann Sumner, and then John Gibbs introduced the proceedings prior to the unveiling. About twenty people were present, including John and Margaret Taylor, who funded the acquisition for the collection as a celebration of their golden wedding anniversary. After the unveiling there was an open question session during which I explained a little of the genesis of the painting, and then we had  a glorious lunch in the University. It was a wonderful occasion and I greatly enjoyed it. My thanks to Dr Sumner’s P.A. Mary McCullough for arranging everything so meticulously, and particularly for organising a parking place outside the Institute so that we were able to unload the painting with ease.
• We had set off at 8 am in order to be at the Barber in time for the 11 am start. Peter drove while I read the map and tried to relax. I’d completed the painting at 2.30 am and the last session at the easel was a massive seventeen hours long, after which I put it into its frame and wrapped it ready for the journey. I made it through the day perfectly well, though I’m paying for it now.
• Having struck a deal with the devil, Dorian Gray kept a painting of himself hidden in the attic. The portrait steadily decayed while his person remained eternally youthful and beautiful. Of course it all ends badly! I have an opposite situation here. I make paintings into which I pour everything, while the physical body gets more shadowy and worn thin from all the effort. Seventeen hours! I tell you, it nearly killed me. I won’t be doing anything like that again in a hurry.

a sneak preview of ‘christ writes in the dust’…

… sub-titled The Woman Caught in Adultery.

The painting is shortly to be unveiled at the Barber Institute, Birmingham. Afterwards I’ll post a full image of it here.

man writing with his finger in the dust

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any progress on the commission I’ve been working on for The Methodist Church Collection of Modern Art, The Woman Caught in Adultery. Some time ago I decided not to write about or show any progress of the painting until it was finished. On the 22nd of this month the Director of the Barber Institute, Dr Ann Sumner, will be hosting the unveiling and presentation of  The Woman Caught in Adultery to all those who have been responsible for the commissioning of it, and once that event has taken place, I’ll post images on the Artlog. But today as a precursor to that, is an image of the second grisaille study made for the composition, that of Christ writing in the dust with his finger. You can see the first study I made for the painting HERE.

montclar in catalunya

Sketch from my Catalunya notebook, made as a background study for The Woman Taken in Adultery.

The drawing was done on the spot, but below is a photograph of the village taken from just about the same viewpoint, to illustrate how I change realities to serve my vision as a painter. In the drawing I’ve made the village appear to be on a steeper mound than it really is, because that’s the shape I need for the part of the composition it’s intended to fill, right at the upper edge of the painting. I want it to loom high, and the roads crossing below will be painted almost as though they’ve been tipped up toward the viewer. I like landscapes that almost feel like maps, and often use flattened perspectives to get that effect.

I never use a photograph at the easel. Drawings made from life are my favoured studio aids, together with notes made at the time. If I use a photograph at all for reference, then that happens at the drawing board-stage, where there’s a process of endless re-drawing to get the image locked in my brain, so that I no longer have to look at any photographic source. Fast, rough little drawings on thin paper, reduced almost to scribbles and full of life. For me photographs as direct reference don’t work. I find them to be deadening. I need to have filtered the shapes, colours, tones and modelling through my own sensibility before I can work them successfully into the stylised world of a painting. I need the alchemy of the drawn line.

out of the blue

For those of you taking an interest in The Woman Taken in Adultery, this little post on a blog unknow to me before today, was kindly sent by Meryl Doney from the Wallspace Gallery.

the woman taken in adultery: grisaille study

project: the woman taken in adultery

The Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art is a staggering assembly of twentieth century British paintings, drawings and sculpture. Artists represented in the collection include Ceri Richards, Jacob Epstein, Elizabeth Frink, Patrick Heron, Eric Gill, Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra, Stanley Spencer and Georges Rouault. Last year I was commissioned to produce a painting for the collection. The subject I was asked to examine, The Woman Taken in Adultery.

It’s a subject full of pictorial possibilities. Although Christians have long since turned away from the Old Testament call to stone adulterers to death, there has been recent lobbying for the establishment of Sharia law in Western countries where Islam has traditionally been a comfortably integrated ‘guest’ faith. Almost overnight questions posed by The Woman Taken in Adultery begin to brim with a new found contemporary resonance.

John Gibbs, who had originally approached me on behalf of the collection, organised a meeting with the Revd Dr John Taylor so that the three of us might discuss the issues, moral and theological, embodied by the text. John Taylor, full of insight and with engagingly alternative ideas to the way the story might be interpreted visually, sent me back to Wales with my imagination ignited. The project cooked slowly while I moved toward the deadlines for my Spring exhibition at the Martin Tinney Gallery and my altarpiece commission for the Saint David’s Music Festival. But now the Methodist project has moved to the head of the queue, and the work is underway.

In Late June the Wallspace Gallery in London will be showing The Collection: highlights and new works from the Methodist collection of modern and contemporary art. I think it unlikely at this moment that the painting will be finished in time for the exhibition. I don’t want another rush to the finishing line… there have been too many of those this year… though I’ve promised Wallspace a grisaille study of a detail for the painting.

Re. my first drawings for the adulterous woman, here’s the thinking. Were she to be depicted as modestly dressed, conventionally attractive, and perhaps even contrite looking, then the die would be loaded, pictorially speaking, toward sympathy for her. I wanted to make the choices for viewers harder than that.

In the UK the news media bombard us with images and stories of ‘lad-ette’ culture… those women who dress to emphasise sexual attractiveness… and arguably, availability… and also drink and party as hard as the boys. Might we too, like the accusers of the woman in the story, be more quick to damn her simply because her appearance is not modest?

In most of the drawings so far her face is turned away and her hands have been bound. All we see… the limbs flagrantly displayed, the skimpy, too-tight dress riding high, the torso doubled over and arms wrenched back and bound at the wrists… indicate a woman brought down by choices that offend the devout.

Her dress is defiant of the social norms for any society bound by religious and moral conventions. She doesn’t even meet the eyes of those who stand against her, but like a beaten beast turns her gaze to the ground.

I’m currently preparing painted grisaille studies for the Wallspace exhibition, and I’ll be posting them as soon as they’re finished.