Last week I began a list of artists whose work I’d been greatly inspired by. Today’s blog is the second part. Some say Wilde, but whoever coined the phrase “Talent borrows, genius steals” is a friend of mine. Well after a certain point I always wanted my drawings to have the look of Victorian book illustrations & I liked the vibe of Connie Jude, Mervyn Peake & Gustave Doré. I liked the controlled nature of their lines. I was never able to go wild & free with a mark, as in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon or Ralph Steadman, no matter how much I admire them. & although I’ve tried being a painter, I feel closer to the work with a pen than I do with a brush. I go back & dabble now & then, but it never takes hold, in spite of the horrific mistakes you can end up making with ink. There’s almost always a point in any work where I’m problem-solving my way out of an inky error. Never mind – if it wasn’t for these guys, I might never have progressed. What can I say? I’m the sum of what I encounter & I’m forever grateful…
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), The Senseless Seven, 1911
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Krampus, 2015
Like Harry Clarke, Spare had a lot of strings to his bow. Not only was he a top class illustrator but his paintings reach levels of realism that are almost unbelievable. But as I’ve noted in a previous blog, he was rarely taken as seriously has he should have been due to his deep interest in the occult & esoteric. As I’ve also noted, I was aware of his work from a very young age & although it was strange & a bit frightening (it’s still pretty unsettling), it was also deeply compelling. This is how it often works, isn’t it? You know you should look away, but you are desperate to see more. & he planted something in my brain. Spare goes big on the satyrs, the mythical & horned creatures & I must admit, I like a skull myself. Many years ago, my partner said, “Skulls are fun to draw,” & he was absolutely right. They are fun to draw & I stuff them in wherever I can, as seen here. My partner & I have always taken turns to design Christmas cards each year & Krampus was a drawing for an alternative Christmas card for 2015.
Abigail Larson (b. 1988), Alice, 2010
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Tinkerbell’s Dream, 2013
I’m no colourist. I’m really not comfortable using colour & for a while, I was looking to the work of Abigail Larson for help & inspiration. I did see it largely as an open experiment – online, I’d credit her vision & admit what I was doing. I even messaged her to say so & she seemed pleased & enthusiastic that she’d inspired me, bless her. Although I like the grumpiness of my Tinkerbell (she’s a little brat), the colour still makes my teeth itch & Abigail is just so much better at it. Just be glad you’re not seeing my oil paintings.
Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), Zodiac, 1897
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Crispian Mills, 2016
It’s about the circles. Art Nouveau is good in terms of line & but some of it’s too cheesy for me, too blousy, too colourful. If there’s no darkness with the light, it rarely speaks to me. My artwork is determinedly non-blousy, although this piece is perhaps as blousy as I get. You can probably see more borrowing from Abigail Larson’s colour scheme. But there are elements of line & shape, even a little pattern that I look to in Mucha’s work. Especially the circles. I’ve always liked the ideas & frankly the mathematics of a circle. The infinity, what happens when you overlap them, how other shapes such as stars can be made using them. Even Leonardo showed us the fun you can have with a circle.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), Title page for Haus Eines Kunstfreundes, c. 1901?
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Tribute, 2014
Okay, so this was supposed to be a lift of some of CRM’s motifs & styles & was made to try to raise funds for the Glasgow School of Art the FIRST time it was burned down. But some of the sweeping lines & definitely the tiny squares (also a Wonderland thing) feature widely in lots of my artwork. CRM’s poster design work is often forgotten or placed along with his wife Margaret’s similar works, but it’s very clean & clear. For instance, this piece has quite an unusual composition for its purpose & it’s unmistakably his style. They say he had dyslexia & came up with this font as a result. It’s one of these stories I’d definitely like to be true. I remember unrepentantly overusing it when I was doing Higher Art at school.
Richey Beckett (b. 1980), The Raven, c. 2015
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Sweetheart Tattoo (from the Ten Plagues series – the plague of flies), 2014
Of all contemporary artists Richey is by far the most influential on my own work. I was immediately drawn to him (no pun intended) because of the monochrome & the very, very fiddly nature of the detail. What I’ve filched from him is the concept of having layers or planes within the work to show depth. Although my own pieces are very flat & look very flat & usually have little to do with perspective at all, I like to have depth. So for instance, rather than just draw a person with a background, I’d have something passing in front of them, as if it was flitting through the air, such as an insect or raindrop or smoke. This idea of planes of space didn’t really occur to me much until I came across Richey’s work & then I wanted to incorporate it into everything else I did. He does a lot of work for bands: posters, one-off print runs, record covers & it’s all of an incredibly, consistently brilliant standard. I also admire his adherence to creating works that contain nothing “industrial” but stick to the “organic.”
That would have been that, except that initially I’d thought to use the following for the influence of Richey Beckett, a 2017 portrait of singer Mark Lanegan. I decided to swap it out thinking “Sweetheart Tattoo” did the comparison better. I’ve stuck with that, but Lanegan died this week. Until I looked this week though, I’d forgotten I’d given him a barbed wire crown of thorns. It’s devastating that such a wonderful voice (both in song & the written word) & an artist so full of heart has gone. Farewell to a no-patience-for-fakes-or-fools soul.
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