Henry Moore did a series of "helmet" forms at one point. Elizabeth Frink did a series of "goggle heads", figures of sunshade bedecked heads. In developing a body of sculptural works I have hit on the idea of doing some female heads in headscarves or shawls. I am exploring how these items can hide/reveal the wearer as well as looking at their aesthetic value.
Moore's helmet forms had the warrior's face half hidden in the helmet. Picasso produced something similar from time to time. Frink's sunspectacled heads did the same. The shades hid the eyes but revealed something else. I think my covered female heads will do the same thing.

Self Portrait. I have usually done one every year or so by drawing "from the life" with the aid of a mirror. This time I worked from a recent photo. I have included it in my profile. It's time I updated it anyway. That last one was done in Larnaka three years ago. Doesn't time fly?

These two drawings are part of a sculptural concept . Drawn on 300 gsm. paper and 35 x 50 cm., slightly bigger than A3. I did the one one the left first. It is primarily a graphite drawing but with a little colour added. On completion I wasn't entirely satisfied with it so re-did it as a monochrome drawing. In both cases I aimed to have the centre of the picture in sharp focus and fusing out towards the periphery. It is a style I have developed of late; I do this to focus the viewer on the central theme of the subject.The work is titled "Libation". Of course there is Cypriot influence here. On the one hand the quasi-Hellenic figures and the other the reference to an ancient culture.

Three figures from the Parthenon.

Graphite on 300gsm. paper. 100 x 70 cm.

I have been drawn to these Hellenic figures for some time now and it has only recently occurred to me why. As I explore these fragments from the very distant past they seem to speak of a sophisticated culture now long gone that has much to tell us in our present day. Surely these were a people that had similar hopes and aspirations to us in the present day. My method of showing these objects is to avoid drawing in the fractures in the sculptures but to simply discontinue the line where the break(s) occur. Sometimes a little colour is added but only partially. The entire form is not coloured. I also tend to have the figures emerging either from the shadows or from intense light that bleaches out some of the image. This one is an example of this. The background is darker to the left of the picture and is fused out to the right. These figures are headless and the arms are incomplete so here the line simply ceases.

The extensive damage was done when the Venetians laid siege to Athens around 1684 when it was occupied by the Turks. Apparently the Parthenon was being used as an ammunition store and suffered a direct hit from the Venetians. Ironic really when the Parthenon was built as a temple to Pallas Athene and Aphrodite before the onset of the Persian wars in 500BCE and was used as such until converted to a Christian church under Constantine. None of the sculpture suffered any major damage throughout all this until the 17# century.

Anyway, back to the art.

I wrote a few quick notes in my sketchbook. They look a bit like a haiku but there the similarity ends.

Ghosts from a distant past

Civilisations long gone

Speak to us today.

Ancient forms

Emerging from darkness

Emerging from light;

Forms and colours

Distorted by time.

Torso of a running girl in the Parthenon. The British Museum inform me it is of a lesser deity called Iris.
I was impressed by the way her chiton flows to accenuate the running action.
Pencil drawing on 300 gsm. paper, 25 x 35 cm.

Four views of the finished ΕΡΜΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΟΣ sculpture. (Hermaphrodite). Length: 35 cms. Carving, pitch pine.

Hermaphrodite. Work in progress.

I haven't featured so many drawings of late as much of my time has been taken up with a renewed interest in sculpture. This is hardly surprising considering the number of trips I have made to Cyprus over the last few years. The Cypriots are, if nothing else, sculptors par excellence. Every autumn there is and exhibition in Larnaka of the Pancyprian Ceramics Festival by some of Cyprus's finest ceramicists. What they show is not merely pottery but sculpture in the fine art sense of the word. By extension this skill extends to stone carving and other sculptural forms. Considering Cyprus' Hellenic past this is hardly surprising.

The influence has "rubbed off" on me and my interest has been somewhat revived. Primarily I work in wood. The material is fairly readily available, driftwood or off-cuts from building site skips. Usually if I ask the foreman at the site he lets me take what I need. But partly limited by studio size and more by the size of the timber pieces my work tends to be rather small.

The two pictures above give some idea what I've been up to lately. The watercolour drawing/painting was done from a sketch taken from a photograph of the statue of Hermaphrodite in a museum in Rome. I made a few maquettes from Plasticine to get some idea as to how this may look in the round before carving the 35 cm long sculpture from a piece of 7.5 x 7.5 cm square timber. At the moment the work is unfinished. The basic carving and primary polishing has been done as shown in the black and white picture. I spent much of today sandpapering the surface and removing some of the more prominent tooling marks. This evening it was given a coating of beeswax and left overnight to let it soak in. Tomorrow I do the final polish. Hopefully I'll show the finished article later.

The Lady of Banbury.

I was in Banbury in Oxfordshire last summer. At the crossroads in the centre of town there is an equestrian statue of the "Fine Lady upon a fine horse" as the nursery rhyme says. The statue is life-size. I took a few photos of it along with making a few sketches in my sketchbook.
In the midst of my present pre-occupation with sculpture I was asked to do an equestrian drawing. Unfortunately they have not returned to collect the work so it currently adorns my studio wall, It is on a sheet of paper 35 x 50 cm. Graphite and watercolour with some water soluble pencil.
The statue is not coloured. It is a metallic silver grey colour. Bronze? I'm not sure. It may be having been subsequently patinated or it could be cast in some alloy.
I thought I'd show it here. I am doing some drawing between carvings but most are of sculptural ideas at the moment.

I am working on the same image(s) as before but doing different versions. These Karyatid figures taken from the Erechtheion in Athens is the basis of this project. Shown here is a corner of my studio where two of the figures, - each panel is four feet (120 cm) tall, - have been drawn as a full-size mock-up of the proposed paintings.

However, once I had done this I thought they could very easily stand as finished works in their own right. So from there I made the other two to make up the set of four.

They are pictured here as they are on the studio wall. The parallax error has not been corrected with photoshop. The heads are portraits of people I know, one of them is a self portrait sans beard. I'll let you guess which one. You may need to click on the picture for an enlarged image. The other missing items are the capitals of the pillars that were an integral part of the structure/sculptures in the Erechtheion. I wantto show the figures purely and simply.