Vessel

This is a sketch of “Raku Angel”, a ceramic sculpture, held together with bolts and nuts, one of Stephen Adams’ steampunk stoneware “Machines of Loving Grace” on display at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.

The idea behind the sketch was to focus on building the texture with marks from the pen, without resorting to the waterbrush to flood and smooth the ink.  Afterwards, I drew lightly into it with conte crayon.

Also on display was work by Birmingham Arts Circle inspired by the written word, of which my favourite was Sue Howells’ “Crow” for which she drew on Dylan Thomas’ description at the start of Under Milk Wood “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing boat-bobbing sea”.

Personal reflection, Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

At school we learned nothing about the Holocaust or Nazi Germany.  In the collective psyche, World War II was still current story, not yet history. At school, we used “Jewish” casually, like “Scottish”, to mean parsimonious or tightfisted.  My own first insight into anti-Semitism came watching the television series, The Ascent of Man.  Jacob Bronowski made a pointed aside “Men like me were not around at that time”, referring to some aspect of life in wartime Germany: I had to ask what he had meant.

Later, I learned of my paternal lineage: my great grandfather coming to Britain as a teenage refugee, leaving his Polish village, fleeing successive pogroms for a better life.  Across four generations, in East London and then industrial Glasgow, sons rebelled against and replicated patriarchial violence, disowned their fathers, married out.  My father was the last to grow up with some sense of Jewish heritage.  In the army, permanently estranged from his father, sharing the same, obviously Jewish, handle with the then Minister of War, sick of ribbing and worse, he abandoned his patrimony and took his mother’s name, which I have today.

Without inheriting a mythology, it was in Narnia that I first found a sense of belonging, of struggle, of sacrifice and redemption, of course in ignorance of the author’s propagandist intentions.  However, the core of my spirituality was shaped by the words of Jacob Bronowski.  I wrote his words out, over a drawing of his face, and stuck this on my bedroom wall at home and later at University.

Standing in the ruins of the extermination camp at Auschwitz, this is what he had to say about science:

“Science is a very human form of knowledge.  We are always at the brink of the known.  We feel forward for what is to be hoped.  Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error and is personal.  Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

Bronowski first opened up to me that our reality is beautiful and amazing, to be approached with boundless curiosity, with honesty and clear sight, without dogma, conscious of the influence of our prior beliefs and with our convictions open to challenge. This is the heart of science, and when incorporated into society and personal relationships, it is revolutionary.

Earlier in that same episode, the camera panned across barbed wire fences, lights  and towers.  Here is what Bronowski said of the Holocaust:

“It’s said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers.  That’s false, tragically false.  Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.  This is where people were turned into numbers.  Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people.  That was not done by gas – it was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.

“When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave.  This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”

Taking a handful of mud from the water he said:

“we have to touch people”.

Three generals

Anthea Hamilton: Project for door

On entering the second Turner Prize installation at the Tate Britain gallery, my son focussed first on Anthea Hamilton’s brick suit tailored from brick textile hanging against a brick mural.  He turned back on himself to be confronted by a giant mooning butt. I could hear him guffawing as I followed.  Like everyone else, we took turns photographing each other in that false doorway framed by giant thighs.

I was struck not by those giant buttocks but at what the sculptor had left out:  there is no anus and no swell of genitalia above the doorway.  I found myself reflecting with sadness and respect that the neat central line might be the scar left by a skilled surgeon when the choices were hard and stakes high.

Standing to one side and drawing, my thoughts changed to reflect a widespread mood of anger and despair.  Perhaps this is a monumental statue of an emperor’s golden arse as he displays his power and contempt.  But he is full of shit and has no balls.

It belongs in Trump Tower.

 

Igor Mitoraj in Pompeii

These are my sketches of the bronze sculptures, placed in the setting of Pompeii’s ruins with the looming presence of Vesuvius behind.  These were done using fountain pen, water, conte crayon and Faber Castell grey brush pens.

I was struck that most of these mock-mythical figures are male.  Though cracked and fractured through pseudo-millennia, they are endowed with mouths and genitals.  The female figures are sparse, without heads and with genitalia obscured, typically by small grotesque masks.

Pompeii forum, with the fallen Icarus (fore), with Tyndareus, father of Helen of Sparta (back)

 

Daedalus, father of Icarus

 

Ikarus and Ikaria: male and female Icarus’

 

Pompeii basilica: centaur

 

Pompeii basilica: Male and female Icarus’

 

Pompeii basilica: first sketches of two Icarus’

 

Intersection of main roads in Pompeii: winged Eros with hand.

 

Second century bath complex: Sulla riva grande screpolata

 

Columned quadrangle by the theatre: Cracked Theseus

 

Female: broken, grasped, silenced

Winged Eros with Hand. Igor Mitoraj.  Pompeii.

On the brink

Waking alone in a hotel room on Wednesday 9th November 2016 I am on the brink of discovering the outcome of the election, across the water, for US president.  This is one event which will surely affect us across the world.  The fear that America will choose as its leader an infantile vengeful narcissist overshadows the historic possibility that it might instead elect its first woman president.

Igor Mitoraj’s monumental sculptures are shaped to suggest their disintegration through the long passage of time.  Here, a vast bronze broken bust is positioned in a room adjacent to the bath house destroyed two millennia ago by the super-heated ash falling from Vesuvius.

This piece is named Sulla riva grande scripolata.  As best I can tell from online translation, this means “on the greater shore, cracked”.  Whatever the events of this day, there will come a time when our civilisation will be known by the cracked fragments found protruding from the pebbles and silt of the river bank.

Seeing, imagining, drawing

 

In the columned quadrangle behind Pompeii’s small theatre had been placed three bronze sculptures by the late Polish artist, Igor Mitoraj.  He drew on classical sources for his bold structures, typically fractured and fragmented to suggest the ephemeral nature of all we build.  Here, Teseo screpolato (Cracked Theseus) is shown against the remains of walls hit not only by Vesuvius but much later by Allied bombing.

I have scraped conte crayon over heavily textured stiff paper then used Faber and Castell cool grey brush pens to deepen the tones on the metal surface and brickwork.

My daughter worked on smoother cartridge paper and gained greater depth of colour from the conte crayons.  I love the interlocking shapes which build the tones of the bronze face.

 

 

Cutting the snow

I am continuing to explore the translation of field sketches into prints from cut lino.  The idea – not yet realised – is not to copy the picture into a print form, but to abstract from the sketch into a set of patterns.

Posted before, this sketch was made in water-soluble pencil while standing in sleet near Malham Cove in Yorkshire.

I miss that place.  In this weather, the sink-holes must be the sites of  torrential falls.  I need to arrange a few days walking.

This last image was from a previous linocut of Malham Cove.  I had used the inky roller to burnish the back of the paper and then, on a whim, printed over the top.

Salt cellar and sugar bowl

I sketched this in the cafe at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

I called in to see the exhibition of SJ Peploe, leading light of the Scottish Colourist movement at the beginning of the last century.  I was struck by his progressive development to abstracting into geometrical shapes while retaining the overall composition in still life or landscape.

I was also moved by the sculptures of Eduardo Paolozzi.  “Vulcan” towered above my table in the cafe.  “Tyrannical Tower Crowned with Thorns of Violence” lurked in an alcove.