The Making of Gawain

The first maquette for the  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight project that I’m working on with Daniel Bugg of the Penfold Press, is finished. Articulated, two-dimensional maquettes… rather like painted versions of the shadow-puppets used by the great animator Lotte Reiniger… have evolved as my compositional aids in the studio. They also serve at the outset of any project as the ‘playtime’ that gets me exploring and into the spirit of things. Decisions get made in them that would be difficult to reach a conclusion on were I to face the choices head on. They simplify my ideas and prevent them from becoming too complicated by concentrating on shape and form. They help me find the subject.

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For this series of fourteen editioned prints, I’ve set myself the task of using images to tell the story. The poetry is is glorious. I could make a hundred images for it and not do justice to the beauty of the words. The translation/re-working of the poem I’m using as my reference/inspiration for the series, is the 2007 one by Simon Armitage. But here’s a snippet describing King Arthur’s attiring of Gawain, from a translation by Paul Deane made in 1999.

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Then he held up his helm and kissed it in haste:
It was stiffened with staples, padded with stuffing,
Sat high on his head, and buckled behind
where the neck-guard was graced with gleaming silk
bedecked and embroidered with the best gems.
There were birds on the seams of the broad silk bands:
painted parrots on a field of periwinkles,
turtledoves entwined with truelove blooms too thick
to be sewn by many women in seven winters’
care.

Yet nothing half so dear
brought color anywhere
as the circlet’s bright and clear
diamonds in his hair.

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It’s heady stuff, all that description. And it works wonderfully in the context of a poem. But it’s the death-of-a-hundred-cuts to the artist, because it’s too detailed. There is too much description. It weighs the illustrator down with information in a way that it doesn’t weigh down the reader. And so for the most part, I eschew the detail of the description, and put myself into the role of ‘illuminator’. My goal is not to illustrate what the poet has conjured, but to help illuminate it with images that aren’t repetitions. I have to build with different blocks.

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The maquettes help me in this editing process. They get me away from the descriptions, and into a different space.

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But most of all, they immerse me in a world where colour, shape and form become intensified.

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Pattern-cutting Gringolet, Gawain’s horse.

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