Do you ever do that thing where you make life more difficult for yourself? On purpose? Me too. So it was with the Ten Plagues series. Not only were there ten to do (which at the start I thought would just be fun, not really a challenge) but I made up some rules to go with them. This way, I thought, the set would have a more unified appearance than if I just tried to go at it full tilt without prior planning. & in fairness, this was correct, but I hadn’t reckoned with my boredom threshold.
I have never been one to get bored easily, if by bored you mean having nothing to do. I always had easy things I liked to do at hand: reading, knitting, writing, drawing. I’ve boasted about it many times. However, if you mean that something repetitive gets boring quickly, then I’m all about that. Looking at the images, you’d think there was enough in them to avoid boredom but that rope! Many times I turned the air blue with boredom over drawing those coils of rope. Begun in 2014, there was a huge gap of doing other things before completing them in 2019. In the end I had two to go & it was quite tricky to return to, since I’d developed my style & ideas in that five years.
But in the beginning, I’d had to think of the bigger picture – the Ten Plagues of Egypt is a great story, God defending his authority, giving the pharaoh every chance to do as he’s told & ultimately winning the day. It’s overwrought, it’s dramatic, it’s petulant, it’s theatrical (as the subsequent art throughout history shows).
But it’s also righteous. It should have been a message to future slave owners everywhere, but as we all know, there are people that like to pick & choose from the bible & its teachings…
Anyway, all on A4 paper & in black ink, my Ten Plagues had the following rules:
• I wanted them to look deceptively attractive – it’s not for me to say if that was achieved, but I wasn’t about to draw anyone covered in boils, that’s for sure
• Each plague would be represented by the head of a real male musician or singer
• They had to have someone else’s hair
• Their eyes had to be blanked out representing the blind or unseeing & indiscriminate nature of the plagues themselves (also trying to evoke old marble statues & the way their eyes have no detail)
• They were all framed by a circle or “porthole” – just about the only completely random aspect of these was the decoration on these circles
• There had to be some nautical connection in the background patterning
• Inside the portholes, the background had to have a waterscape from somewhere in NE Scotland (in the end, a couple didn’t)
• Each image would be named after a song by Peter Holmstrom’s band, Pete International Airport (PIA). I don’t know why. I’d started naming works after songs or lyrics a long time before, having stolen the idea from my partner who used to name his artworks after Fall songs (a rich seam of imagery & plenty to choose from). I was grateful when PIA put out their second album, so I had more titles to pilfer…
Working on the Ten Plagues was also the first time I was seriously working on different planes, to give the impression of depth in each image, an idea I was inspired by Richey Beckett to use. The results or harbingers of each plague would be brought to the “front.” For some of the plagues, it was difficult or undesirable to be too literal. For instance in the Death of the First Born, well I wasn’t about to depict that successfully in this style, so black feathers seemed to me to be a suitable metaphor.
It’s weird looking at these drawings in any detail again because usually once a picture’s done I’ve no further interest in it.
Plague 1: Blood - Battle Scars
The seascape in the background is at Dunnottar Castle, about 18 miles from Aberdeen. I feel it’s the best of the heads. I did wonder how I’d depict blood in black & white & although I’m not entirely satisfied with the solution, I think the darkness of the drops is appropriate. The wheat was referring to the Old Testament’s Joseph & his dreams.
Plague 2: Frogs - New Eastern
It took a while to decide how to depict the frogs, especially in the foreground but having them leap across the paper seemed like the best plan. As frustrating as those tentacles appear to me now, I recall really enjoying drawing them.
Plague 3: Gnats/Fleas/Lice - Dance Around the Broken
One of the last ones I did. Why eyes for the plague? Why not. But I liked tangling them up in his hair. The pebbles were inspired by the pebble beach at Collieston, around 30 miles out of Aberdeen. If I concentrate, I can feel them & hear them crunching & shifting drily beneath my feet as I walk across them, trying not to slip.
Plague 4: Flies - Sweetheart Tattoo
This was the first of the ten I made. I remember it clearly because the head was based on Peter Holmstrom himself (you can try to guess the rest if you like – so far only one other person ever did) but with Kurt Cobain’s hair. I also remember loving drawing the flies. I’m a big fan of making card templates in order to achieve a uniformity of shape & I keep them in a small wooden box, shaped like a pirate’s chest. So I had made two fly templates for this to give the impression that the smaller ones were pushed back. Beasties – invertebrates - are a lot of fun to draw. They have an incredible amount of detail in them for such small creatures The lighthouse is Aberdeen’s Girdle Ness, still an active light which was built twenty years after a catastrophic sinking in 1831 in which forty-two out of forty-four men were lost.
Plague 5: Death of Livestock - G2
I remember making a colossal mistake in this one & I can still see it! Nevertheless all those skulls & bones were a dream to draw. It seemed to make more sense to have the leaves in the foreground rather than the bones for this one.
Plague 6: Boils - After All
Not 100% sure of my reasoning for this one but I think the bells were there to carry an idea of plagues gone by with the little falling drops to represent the boils rather than show scabby skin. I did not enjoy drawing the seaweed & it shows.
Plague 7: Hail - Idioms for Dummies
Definitely inspired by Harry Clarke’s depictions of anemones & starfish & other rock pool articles. I’m quite pleased I chose to make the background darker so the hail was more prominent.
Plague 8: Locusts - Repeater
Argh! That ROPE! It was the bane of my life at the time. Probably my least favourite, although I’m quite pleased with the locusts. Again, I had two different sized templates for these.
Plague 9: Darkness - Starlight
Having raven’s wings to depict the dark seemed like the only solution. I think this is the most successful of the images overall but I might just be biased in favour of dark things.
Plague 10: Death of the First Born - 21 Days
Here I was definitely using the ossuaries & catacombs of Europe as inspiration. It may be the least nautical but let’s face it, & I’ve drawn so many feathers in my time, I didn’t even bother with a template.
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