equus: what you didn’t see!

The process of illustration involves creating plenty of images that will never make it through into the final book. On Equus this was truer than on any other Old Stile Press project I’ve worked on. As we approach the first anniversary of the publication of the book, I’ve been sorting through the box-files of drawings set aside at the time I completed the project and was clearing the decks ready for the next one. Here are a few of the drawings for illustrations that were abandoned, or else evolved into something quite different.

There’s a conversation in the play between Alan’s mother Dora, and Dysart the psychiatrist:

Dora And then I remember I used to tell him a funny thing about falling off horses. Did you know that when Christian cavalry first appeared in the New World, the pagans thought horse and rider were one person?

Dysart Really?

Dora Actually they thought it must be a god. It was only when the rider fell off, they realised the truth.

My first thought was to illustrate the episode, and I started with the notion that the image might show the bones of both the horse and rider, as though the ‘pagans’, on realising that here was a mortal enemy and not a god, had killed both where they had fallen. I started with some drawings of a horse skeleton.

Then I added in the fallen conquistador. Suddenly the drawing was  looking as though it might need to be full page.

At this point I began to realise that although I liked the image a lot, it might be getting too specific for what I felt should be the general feel of the book. So I decided to jettison it, though not before making this detailed study of the fallen man.

In another scene Alan’s father Frank reveals how he spied on his son through an opening in the boy’s bedroom door late one night. He tells of watching as Alan fitted a makeshift horse-bit made from string into his mouth, and then proceeded to beat himself viciously with a coat hanger. The drawings I made were initially explicit in a way that the play in performance could not be. This was at a stage that I was toying with the idea of never showing Alan’s face in the book.

This approach was abandoned, and the illustration eventually appeared in a sexually frank, though less explicit drawing, for which the image below was one of the studies.

And here a drawing in which I attempted to get into Alan’s nightmares after the horse-stabbing incident. I never pursued this idea as it seemed immediately clear to me that there was too much information in the image.

There were literally hundreds of Equus drawings made during my year on the project, of which these are just a handful. Some may evolve into paintings one day, but most are just remnants of a process of work. It’s interesting looking back at the ideas that were abandoned. There were any number of ways that the book could have been done, and I explored various possibilities for as long as I could, given the need to have Equus in readiness for its launch at the 2009 London Art Book Fair.

With a painting there can always be more than one version and I frequently return to the same subject to try it again in another way. For example, I’ve painted three quite different versions of the Annunciation. But this was my only crack at an illustrated edition of  Shaffer’s play about the boy who blinded horses. There’s no returning to it to have another go, something I’m regularly haunted by in the matter of making books. What Nicolas and Frances produced at the Old Stile Press is it. I still enjoy looking at their creation in its ingenious folding slipcase, though it will be forever my nature to ponder ‘What if?’