It was St Valentine’s Day this week & although it’s not a big deal round our place, you can’t escape it. Shops, businesses, TV, online…little pink & red hearts as far as the eye can see. Now, I wear my heart on my sleeve as far as many things go, in particular art influences. There are things I like, things I love & things that find their way into my own artwork. Sometimes it’s more obvious than others, like the spell I went through of painting portraits of Gustav Klimt in the style of…well, Gustav Klimt. See more of this kind of thing below.
You might think this is an excuse to simply post some of my own art, but it’s more about the love & the process. I do always love the process more than the finished piece so I thought it might be interesting to write about it. I’ve also been thinking about a couple of works I’m going to be making & haven’t got to starting yet, so art is on my mind in all kinds of ways. All my pieces are ink & paper. Here is the first of a two-part blog about artists whose work has influenced mine & I’m endeavouring to explain what they’ve done for me. I hope you feel the love.
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Portrait of Fritza Riedler, 1906
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Captain Sensible, 2018
Now & again, I’ll “collect” shapes, patterns, decorations from specific artists, i.e. sift through a mound of their works & sketch out (in pen) the individual motifs I find. Sometimes these will make their way into a drawing I’m doing & I often go back to these little sketched pages for ideas, inspirations or springboards. There are only a handful of such pages, but they nevertheless always offer something up for gentle pilfering. Klimt is one of the artists who never fail to provide me with inspiration, even since my school days. At first, I was interested in the patterning & I read a great description once that Klimt would surround his subjects with a “nest of decoration.” I’ve often done this, making sure the decoration represents the subject in some way. I then got into using gold & silver paint which was fiddly & doesn’t show up well when photographed or scanned (see also gel pen).
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), The Coiffing, 1896
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In Our Need, 2012
I get very bored when people compare artists I like with Beardsley & it happens a lot. I adore Beardsley – he was one of my first true art loves – & I it’s likely he was the one that taught me that monochrome is best… But comparing any artist with Beardsley is frequently an idle assessment made by people hoping to show off. There. I said it. You can tell Beardsley a mile off. He’s there in what he leaves out as much as what he puts in. He lurks in vast empty spaces in a composition, where others wouldn’t dare. In any case, I made this image for a book of poetry I was illustrating & I was shamelessly ripping off Beardsley as a kind of response to all that lazy comparison. Shamelessly.
Alasdair Gray (1934-2019), Homage to Bill Skinner,
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Blackstar, 2016
It’s fair to say my own art is very line-oriented. Apart from an insistence on careful line & attention to detail, there might be little to link Alasdair’s pictures & my own, but I was very interested in his use of brown wrapping paper pasted onto board as a medium. It gives the works a transparent but visible line pattern across each piece. I’ve looked for it in his work ever since. You used to be able to get huge rolls of brown paper, which must have been useful to get sizes he wanted. I have a pad of rough brown paper which I don’t like much – it’s larger than standard measurements (a nuisance for framing), it has flaws (you can see some here) & I like my paper smooth – so it’s taking ages to use up. In any case, Alasdair was the reason I used the brown. It’s one of several portraits I made of David Bowie after his death.
Harry Clarke (1889-1931), Vision of Bernadette at Lourdes (two details), 1925
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Dark Star, 2015
Another “star” in more ways than one. I regard this as my best work & it’s stuffed with love. Harry Clarke, my ultimate art hero in the style of Harry Clarke. It wasn’t the first time I’d attempted such a thing, but I made the mistake of adding colour in the past & it wasn’t as successful. It rarely is. Like Klimt, I’ve doodled many of Harry’s little shapes & motifs & there are so many to find both in his illustrations & his stained glass windows. Plenty of them can be found in this drawing. Here I was going for making a portrait of Harry in the style of one of his stained glass windows, where he’d make the black leads part of the image. The reference for his head is from a group photo with Harry as a young man. At the time I didn’t have the photo anywhere on paper so whilst watching one of the films about him on DVD, I paused it when this picture came up & took a picture on my phone. At least now you can do that. In the days of VCR & no mobile phones/digital cameras, I used to pause a clip & have to draw from the TV. More difficult than it sounds…
Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Racing Thoughts, 1983
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Rapunzel, 2021
This is one of my most recent pieces & it was for a Grimm exhibition. I was reading an excellent book about Jasper Johns at the time & we were locked down again. It made sense to go for Rapunzel as a subject, since she was locked away too. I was trying to convey a sense of being trapped by falling apart, simultaneously claustrophobic & scattered. Johns’s Racing Thoughts suggested a feeling of being broken apart & that feeling being part of an overall composition. I got the sense of having someone on the outside, controlling everything at that time – not paranoia, just not having any power over our circumstances, hence the hand (model: my own) pulling at the hair…
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