When, over recent weeks, I was anticipating my current hospital admission, I kept getting this visual image, part abstract part figurative, of a human figure on all fours on a bed (this in no way resembles what actually is happening 😆).
So this small sketch draws on that strange mental image. The texture was built in collage of a fragmented photograph of Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus, gesso was applied then colour in a thin layer of oil paint.
This was my initial sketch in conte crayon.
High on serotonin, oxytocin, endorphin and chocolate I found random objects, lumps of volcanic rock and an ornamental polished fossil, and drew on toned paper, with the vague idea that these were both boundaried within and breached the boundaries of drawn frames, as in a graphic novel, except I then coloured in these rectangles.
This started with a 15 minute sketch on Reading Station and a certain mood.
This was the sequence of painting, starting with the varying opacity seen through the canvas made by the initial acrylic white layer priming the canvas.
Then building in shapes taken from the platform, rails and evening sky in water-miscible oils.
Was this the point I should have stopped? It seemed too muted.
Three weeks ago I went to meet people gathering near Cambridge with whom I identify and whom I had only met through social media before now. The Friday night and then the breakfast on Saturday morning have, I think been transformative. Driving back, the thoughts and memories merged with the light over the road and started to form into this abstract which I have subsequently painted in oils.
This is how it started.
This is an exercise in using oils. I feel a bit more in control, mixing with a knife and using paint on the tip of the brush rather than over loading the bristles. Where needed I am blending on the canvas.
There was no sketch. The only idea was the hard edge between orange and blue centre stage and a vague sense of yellow and green at the top.
Rotating this 90 degrees and working further imposed a child-like grammar of landscape – blue sky and clouds above, earth colours, mountains, trees, grass, below.
The other way up, blue and white are water and surf crashing onto rock faces.
Rotate back one quarter and I am staring down the cliffs onto a torrent. It needs the dentate leaves of ferns and, far below, the small shapes of wheeling pterosaurs.
I’ve been following a lot of fabulous palaoeart on twitter recently which is rubbing off on me. See these as examples, fossil fish and the first pterosaur to be recognised as being furry. Here are some more. Mark Witton, whose sketch accompanies a piece on the BBC world service, is a fabulous palaeoartist I have followed for some time.
This is Packwood House, built by a 16th century family of yoeman farmers (including the second generation lawyer) who accumulated land and built this house through their own labour, likely the unrecognised labour of the household’s women, and the labour of other hired workers (for example, it was extended by Roger Hurlbutt, a notable master carpenter, in 1670). In the eighteenth century that family laid out the huge yew topiary representing the twelve apostles and their master. That lineage having foundered, the much modified Elizabethan house was transformed into a twentieth century artwork by Graham Baron Ash, who incorporated architectural structures from old buildings facing demolition and historical objects harvested from salesrooms. These included a bed slept in by a queen the eve before giving battle and a chimney piece that might once have warmed Shakespeare’s arse. This Ash was fourth generation of a line of business men, two generations prospering through four surviving sons, moving from grocery into manufacturing from zinc. Their company, Ash and Lacey, still operates today: it reported in 2018 a gender pay gap of 15.9% commenting this is lower than the national average. Most zinc is mined. I cannot tell where the Ash family’s zinc originated, perhaps from northern India during the Empire, nor the labour conditions by which the metal was extracted.
We are all doing our best, at home or in scrubs, masked, at work.
Yet there seems a vacuum in government, a deliberate loss of governance.
Four months in, locked down, our health system turned upside down, we have yet to start the actual work of managing the pandemic.
The core work of Public Health is being outsourced to amateurs, like contracting cross-channel supply to a company without boats.
Still no systematic identification of cases, testing, contact tracing, isolation of individuals.
Meanwhile our population isolation is being eased, spasmodically, to suit the news cycle.
Only now we start quarantining arrivals and at the same time, schools are to open, shops to open.
Will home-made masks and two metre distancing be enough to stop another explosion?
And in the midst of this, there is no accountability for those in charge, no rule of law.
Is this a sideshow, have they their own agenda to pursue while we are distracted?
Clever hands deceive the eye.
kestrelart 