St Helena's Chapel - Cape Cornwall

In the latter part of Sketchbook Item (2) mention was made of the numerous sites and remains of chapels attributed to just as many minor saints and solitary religious. This is one such which can be found just north of Land's End in Cornwall about a half mile or so out of St. Just. It is marked on OS Explorer maps.

This drawing was done quite some time ago in the middle of a December gale blowing straight in off  the Atlantic. I have memories of sheltering behind a stone wall and making preliminary sketches with hands that were rapidly turning into frozen claws and finally giving up by taking a photo to work from later. The finished piece is about A4 size and as usual on 300 gramme Snowdon cartridge.

As for the claw-like hands; I have a memory of sitting in a café in St. Just with said claws around a cup of steaming Cappuccino and trying not to cry out as feeling returned. Now that is what I call suffering in the name of Art! Then again perhaps not.

Sketchbook Items (3)

High up on the summit ridge of a Pennine Fell in Northumberland or Cumberland there's a shepherd's cott. In fact they can be found dotted all over the place. Some have found new life as resting places for the grouse-shooting fraternity while others have been restored by the MBA (Mountain Bothies Association) and many more  allowed to fall into ruin or even disappear altogether.
The sequence of sketches shown here are of one such in the last category. It no longer exists.  The fell featured on the middle right page is where it was , Halton- Lea Fell overlooking the village where I lived nearly forty years ago. So the building shown here is how I imagined it might look having noted the placing of the foundations and the faint path leading to where the door could have been.The cliff is no more than five or six feet high and my guess is the bothy would be a lead-to affair.
Its an interesting little side-project, -  another work-in-progress.

Sketchbook Items (2)

The Dream of the Rood shown yesterday is only a part of a larger ongoing project made up of several parts.
This double-page spread plus the one below, from the current sketchbook form fragments of a story that's been germinating in my mind for quite some time. A bit of a romantic quasi-legend that looks back towards a long forgotten solitary hermit who lived in a tiny two-roomed cottage deep in the trackless midst of a very ancient forest. It is the changes that the cottage sees is what the sequence of sketches is about; it's coming into being, subsequent decline then veneration as a Holy Site then the forest reclaiming the Site.

Many such ancient ruined or semi ruined chapels can be found all over the remoter parts of the British Isles. Many are marked on Ordnance Survey maps and some are attributed to some sage lost in the mists of antiquity. Needless to say I've made a number of on-site drawings or, if the weather won't permit or for that matter whilst travelling with others, a photograph is taken to work on later. I'm quite fascinated by these little chapels. What was it like living in them? and why were they put there in the first place and for that matter, what is the story behind it all?

Sketchbook Items (1)

If I may move away from the "music themed" work for a while I'll post some items from my much-used sketchbook. One idea I'm looking at is the Saxon Writing, "The Dream of the Rood" by an unknown author but has an archaic English translation.   What is shown  is a concept of a chancel arch based on the one in Jarrow. There is a similar church in Sunderland. Both have connections to the Venerable Bede, a famous 7th. century monk. Whether or not Bede was involved with the poem is uncertain.

Archaeological evidence elsewhere suggests Saxon roods were stone affairs built in to the very structure of the building unlike their mediaeval wooden counterparts. A "rood" is a form of the Christian's cross.

This image is an exploration of the above idea incorporating verses from the "Dream".

The verse I've put into the sketch is shown below.

The choicest vision I do tell

Which came as a midnight dream

I saw a wondrous tree

Borne aloft - wound with light

The brightest of beams.

All was that beacon sprinkled with gold.....

..... All beheld the angel of God

Fair through pre-destiny.

[This] was no malefactor's gallows,

As holy souls beheld it.

I saw the Glory Tree....

Full text etc. here.

What was on that Drawing Board

I posted just over a week ago that I would post what can barely be glimpsed in the picture. O.K., -  bog standard excuse I know, but its been a busy week. Actually I'm somewhat indisposed just now which gives me  more time to be on this rather ancient and consequently slow PC and post an update or two.

So what we have here is the completed line drawing subsequently inked over of "Brahms' German Requiem - Part 1". The actual composition consists of nine parts and my plan is only do two of them before moving on. They are "Selig Sind" (Blessed are they) and "Denn alle Fleisch ist wie Gras und Blümen" (All flesh is like grass and flowers). The theme [Selig sind] looks at those who traverse from darkness, shown here as dense overgrown forest, and through the central area where it thins out to  the open ground beyond, though the mist shrouded ruin might well suggest remaining uncertainty. But really I leave the interpretation  to you.

Selig sind die da Leid tragen or blessed are they that bear sorrow, a loose translation from the original German, is the title of the finished piece. It is supposed to have a stave of the music beneath it. I will add that later.

As with all of this series, a selected area, in this case the central part, is in full colour fading out to monochrome or greyscale towards the edges of the work. It is my attempt to show the cadences of this particular musical passage. The work is on Fabriano 5 paper at 300 grammes per square metre (gsm) weight and 50 x 35 cms.

At the Drawing Board

The Artech board that I work from. As can be seen a work is in progress here though it was completed a couple of weeks ago.
I'll show more about this tomorrow.

Bach B minor Mass: - the Drawing.

The title looks like it should read "Bach B minor - the Movie" but no, its a drawing on 300 gsm cartridge 50 x 70 cm. It is the finished piece developed from the study sketch, - along with several others, - shown previously. Close examination should reveal some of the technical drawing aspects I've used. The German Romantics have played a role here, the painter David Caspar Friedrich and the composer Robert Schumann as well as my own interpretation.  I spent lot of my time when I was younger walking the more infrequently visited parts of the Northumberland and Scottish Border areas so quite naturally, I suppose, such features as coniferous forests, moorland, standing stones and ancient ruins.  I think I've inadvertently walked in the footsteps of the solitary wanderer featured so much in both the artist's and musician's footstep to say nothing of the writers such as Goethe and Schiller. Yes it is all very German and it is my second language to boot.

But enough of that. Sufficient to say this is a drawing using black ink and micro pen for the line and the "painterly" component is coloured inks and  brushwork.

The Sanctus in Bach's work has a filigree quality which I've reflected in the  tree-tops and the tall straight tree-trunks provide the rhythmic bass which could be the huge diapason pipes of the organ. But let's not get too bogged down in explanations. I'd  prefer you to make your own interpretation(s).

A Resurrection of Sorts

This blog has laid dormant for quite some time but finding the capacity to write what may sometimes be lengthy tracts is somewhat limited on Facebook though I will be keeping that page alive nevertheless.
To start the ball rolling again I've posted this image; an A4 sized sketch which is one  many sketches done in support of my latest project exploring the link(s) between visual art and music. This isn't a journey into synaesthesia but may well feature some aspects of this. Let's just see how it all pans out.

This is a composite built up listening to the Sanctus from J. S. Bach's B minor Mass. The musical structure emanating from the sound of this piece and the patterns of the notes on the stave suggest, - to me, - the imagery of hidden pinnacles, the point tops of coniferous trees and ancient artefacts such as standing stones and ancient ecclesiastical buildings.The painter David Caspar Friedrich and the composer Robert Schumann's romantic lieder depicting the solitary wanderer come to mind as does the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. But more of that anon in future postings.

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.

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.