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.

Ink version of the four caryatids.

I used Quink writing ink for this. It is water soluble and loses its blackness when water is added. The colours separate into subtle blues and browns. Presumably the blue is a pigmant like Ultramarine but the browns I strongly suspect involve oak gall. Oak gall has for centuries been a basic component of ink.

Four Caryatids from the Erechtheion in Athens. Pencil sketch on 300 gsm paper. A version in Quink ink is underway and will be posted later.

Agamemnon, Electra and Orestes.

These three are gouache paintings derived from the initial drawings, (see previous), done to try and get some idea how the finished work might look. I have already shown the protagonists

in the November 27 posting.

From these two triptychs I have made a computet simulation of how I would like the finished work to be presented in a gallery. You can see this here.

As this site is called The Draughtsman I suppose I should put in some evidence of pure line drawing to support the paintings in the last two posts.

These six images are reference tracings taken from the original drawings. I made drawings intitially to work out just where things go as it were but then needed to overpaint them to see how it all works out. But before proceeding to the painting stage I made these tracings. Being on tracing paper and drawn to scale in relation to the planned finished work, I can, if need be, project this onto the canvas via an overhead projector. Purists may regard that as cheating but there is strong evidence to suggest the old masters used optics extensively.

If you click on the image you should get a full size version.

To those photographers who look at this site from time to time, I suppose these tracings and to some extent drawings can be looked at in the same way as negatives. By that I mean photographers who still practise the dark[room] arts! (grins).

The opposite three figures in the Orestian Trilogy. Here we have, reading left to right, Cassandra, Aegisthos and Clytemnestra.

Cassandra was a prophetess who had been cursed by Apollo in that nobody believed her prophesies, even though they all turned out to be true. She was I think in a bit of a "Monty Python" situation. She had been brought back to Mycenae as a trophy/slave from Troy by Agamemnon and in the play she even prophesied her own death and the manner of it.

Aegisthos was promised the throne by Clytemnestra provided he help her assasinate her husband. This he did but was really only a puppet king thereby. He carries his bronze sword, he is not entirely blameless.

Clytemnestra has blood on her hands. She not only murdered her husband but she beheaded Cassandra and butchered all the children Cassandra had by Agamemnon. She is downcast. Her only son will avenge his father's murder.

Enough of the slaughter and mayhem.

These three images are gouache on paper and each is 30 cm (12") high. This is also experimental work to see how the paintings might look. The idea is to have the triptychs facing each other so that Agamemnon is opposite Clytemnestra; Aegisthos is opposite Electra; Cassandra is opposite Orestes. Note the backgrounds are pale towards the left and dark towards the right. This is to set the mood. Note the Agamemnon/Electra/Orestes group are the opposite way, darkness to the left.

How big to make the final pieces? I put it to some of the others in the studio and the consensus was that I should make a six foot tall mock-up on paper of one figure and try a four footer on another and see how they work. So that will be the next stage. I'll probably get down to it in the New Year. We are all rather busy in the studio with Christmas card making. Artists always make their own.

Well, we do!

The Orestian Triptych
If you've been following this blog for the last few days you will have been watching this project grow. Today I completed the Electra image so now the triptych is complete, - in its water-colour form. This is a preparatory work on paper, though in its way is complete in itself. The plan is to develop this into a larger painting. I had originally intended the panels to be six feet tall; pretty well life-size. But now I wonder, perhaps they would be better at four feet tall (120 cm). What is shown here is 24" (60 cm tall). I have done it this size so that scaling up shouldn't be too complicated.
Anyone out there got any thoughts? 120 cm ? 180 cm ?
There is another triptych planned to go with this one, the three protagonists; Clytemnestra, Aegisthus and Cassandra. Watch this space. I may be a week or two working on it.

I've spent the last few days developing the image for "Elektra" who will stand between Agamemnon and Orestes in the triptych.

Here is the line drawing of the final design. She is a weeping figure. In both Aeschylus' and Sophocles' versions she spends much of the time in the mid-section of the trilogy lamenting the loss of her father and, ultimately, cultivating hatred for her mother.

Is it only in Greek tragedy, I wonder, that grief is allowed to ferment into poisonous hatred and find release in violent retribution? I remember when seeing Sophocles Electra just how raw those expressed emotions were. The play was in Greek but you didn't need to understand the language to get gripped by the drama.

I get the feeling my finished work will seriously understate this. You can judge when it is completed.

Four [Hellenic] figures. A little out of sequence here but are part of the exploratory process which brought me to the start of the ongoing project. There is a lack of logical connectedness in that the grey-clad figure on the left is a caryatid from the Erektheion in Athens, the middle two golden-clad figures are of Artemis and the right-hand one in white is a composite of Aphrodite. The Aphrodite was taken from a sculpture (as were they all) which is headless and armless and entirely nude. The torso is in the museum in Pafos, Cyprus and the head is in the Central museum in Nicosia. I decided to drape the figure to keep it all in context.

I suppose it could be argued that Aphrodite could remain naked among her clothed fellow deities for she was noted for her promiscuity despite her being, apart from the goddess of love, she was the defender of matrimonial fidelity.

Each of these panels are 7 x 42 cm and are together on a single sheet of paper 55 x 50 cm. The work is in gouache on 300 gsm paper.

To further illustrate the development of this work here is the line drawing, built up from original sketchbooks.

And here, some gouache has been applied. The idea of this is to work out how, and if they would work as paintings. This particular piece was intended as something of a "test-bed" but I think it stands as a work in its own right.

Agamemnon. Companion piece to "Orestes" posted yesterday. This piece is the same size at 60 cm tall. This is a mixed media drawing utilising both soft graphite and charcoal. To get the subtleties of tone I had to layer up several times.

There now only remains "Elektra" to draw. I envisage doing that as a line drawing with watercolour washes.

At the moment I have a large body of work assembled of the "Sea Pictures" so there is not so much pressure to produce new work in that direction. This leaves me free to concentrate on my Hellenic project(s) which hark back to the times I spend in Cyprus.

Not surprisingly the mythological material coupled with the modern Cypriot Art scene has exerted something of an influence here. Many years ago when I was in my late teens/early twenties I avidly read the Greek classics. My trips to Cyprus have re-awakened this interest. I have done a lot of random drawings of Hellenic style figures, mainly female, but there has been no real cohesive plan. It was rather like looking around a new environment and just taking everything at face value.

But now, I seem to be on a roll. My plan is to produce around fifteen pieces making up triptychs and polyptychs. The first is a look at the Orestian Trilogy which deals with the murder of king Agamemnon after his triumphant return from the Trojan War; his daughter, Elektra's grief and growing hatred for her mother, Klytemnestra who killed her father Agamemnon and finally the return of her brother Orestes who avenged the killing by an act of matricide.

Not quite your gentle family story.

Shown here is a preliminary drawing of Orestes. This drawing is 24" tall. The plan is to make paintings six feet tall. But a happy accident in making this drawing is making me reconsider. Perhaps these should be works on paper? Finished mixed media drawings rather than paintings? Such is the journey of discovery we call Art. We have an idea, then a plan, then have a rethink. So which way shall this project go I wonder?

As well as the Agamemnon/Elektra/Orestes trilogy, I think another triptych is called for of the protaginists for want of a better word, Klytemnestra/Aegisthos/Kassandra. These would, ideally be shown on a wall opposite the first three. I would like to do three goddesses as another triptych, namely; Artemis/Athene/Aphrodite. Also a four part polyptych featuring the female figures, - caryatids, - of the Erektheion at the Acropolis in Athens.

All these works are intended to be six feet tall.

Theme and variations. A musical term that describes what I am doing now. I can see a correlation between the patterns created by written music on the page and the movement of waves. There is also this same correlation with interpretation of a given form. Each different media makes its own interpretation just as different instruments or music voices make theirs.

Tone, form, harmony... musicians and artists use language the same way.

An exercise in layering. I am trying different approaches to interpreting the sea. These two strips of sea are as viewed from overhead. The one on the left is in traditional graphite while the one on the right has been made with successive layers of transparent coloured ink.

What I find fascinating is the random abstract shapes of the patches of foam. Even more interesting is meticulously copying these abstract shapes rather than simply generating my own. None of the shapes readily resemble a predetermined or recognisable object so in drawing them all preconceptions are eliminated. It makes for a good exercise in pure observation I think.

The continuous movement of the sea makes these shapes extremely transient. They change by the second and no way can an accurate drawing be done in that time. So these are made from photographs and drawn in the comfort of the studio.

Despite the foregoing, the drawn shapes do take on a life of their own as the character of these components change with the application of each successive layer.

This is "work in progress" I reckon.

I was at a week-end family get-together up in the Lakes recently. Sunday morning I got up early and went for a walk. Things come into very sharp focus at times like this and seem to say "Draw me, now."

The distant hills rising out of the mists melting in the growing sunlight and the small puddle on the byway reflecting the sky and shining like a sapphire.

Actually my mainstream art had been a bit in the doldrums of late and this walk awakened my eyes again. Now back in the studio the ideas are flooding in more than time and energy can cope with. But then that is the sort of problem I'd rather have.

A modern dress study and an Amazon from Classical times. An interesting similarity in clothing style. I don't think our ancient Amazon would look out of place walking down a 21st century street.

Study of a Hellenic image made during my residency at Lemba, near Pafos in Cyprus.
Mixed media drawing; watercolour, gouache and graphite on size A2

300gsm paper.

I always tend to give these Hellenic deities intense but sightless blue eyes partly in defference to their mediterranean origins but also that although gods, they were not all-seeing. If they were they would not have so selfishly inflicted so much suffering on mortal humanity.

A classic example is Leda and the Swan where Leda was seduced by Zeus disguised as a swan. She in turn gave birth to Helen who ultimately caused the Trojan War.

Another interpretation in the Hermaphrodite series. Each square is 10 x 10 cm. Gouache on paper. The whole mounted on a 60 x 20 cm panel.