Held
2011 – Conté pencil and acrylic on Arches paper – 56 x 76 cm
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog:
views from the artist's studio.
Held
2011 – Conté pencil and acrylic on Arches paper – 56 x 76 cm
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This is such a wonderful new take on the theme of “The Green Man” – more human, embodied and real, less archetypal. I love it.
I’m glad you like it Brenda. I’ve been painting on the theme of Saint Kevin for a number of years. You can see some of the earlier works if you click on Kevin and the Blackbird in ‘Topics’. This recent exploration of ‘greening’ came about after I’d had the idea of the woodland canopy casting shadows on the saint’s body, and from that developed the notion of a staining, as though the leaves of the tree he had transformed himself into had become a foliate stigmata upon his skin.
Thanks for dropping by.
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I love the new works you are posting and it’s been really interesting to see some of them in progress on your blog. This one has a lovely stillness about it…
Thank you Chloe. I’d hoped to capture stillness in this drawing, as though the long months of guarding the blackbird’s nest have turned the saint so deeply inward that nothing can bring him back to the world.
If you can, please keep watching. There are more paintings and drawings coming.
They are all beautiful, but this one speaks to me above the rest. Just wonderful.
I’m so pleased you like this Bev. It marks a real change of spirit in the Saint Kevin series. I see the tattoos as being a version of the stigmata, a manifestation of the tree the saint turned himself into in order to support and shelter the blackbird’s nest.