Culture with a small letter “c”…

Last week I received a call for papers for the Fourteenth Annual Eastern Caribbean Islands Culture(s) Conference.  Glancing through the abstracts submitted for last year’s conference, I concluded that this was culture with a capital “C” and strictly in the realms of the region’s academia. 

Early yesterday morning, at the Roseau Saturday Market, I found culture alive and kicking with a small letter “c”.   The second-hand bookstall and poetry readings were part of an outreach event for the island’s forth-annual Literary Festival.  You can learn more about the festival at www.dominicalitfest.com

As luck would have it, our son Tristan found the final volume for his thirteen volume, Series of Unfortunate Events and  I picked up a copy of Noel Coward’s Collected Sketches and Lyrics.  As you can see, the book has weathered many a storm since it was published in 1931, but I’ll cherish it all the more for that.  It will still be on my shelf when your Kindles, Nooks and iPads have given up the ghost.  What’s more, it looks like a book, feels like a book, smells like a book and cost only one dollar EC!



Dominica ain’t easy, nuh…

When I quoted the above catch phrase to a Dominican friend today, she added, “Living the Dream”!

To survive my day goes to and fro from one thing to another.  And it’s not just between painting and sculpting.  That would be easy.  It’s the extremes and the bits between that are the challenge. 

Today started with an inspection of the machine presently used for washing tania and dasheen – a machine which from the look of it has been washing the crops for the last fifty years.   It ended with a determined effort to get back to work on my bas-relief.  Between the two I painted a new number plate for our pick-up truck (it’s due for its road test tomorrow), mended the sewing machine, cleared a drain and, in the pouring rain, scrubbed mould off the wooden deck that leads from the studio to the garden (necessary before someone breaks their neck).  Hence my friend’s rejoinder, “Living the Dream”. 

Here, from one extreme to the other, is the machinery and my reclining nude.

Musing on the vicissitudes of life…

A couple of months ago, down by the riverside, I made the palm-thatched shelter that is shown in today’s photograph.  The idea was, that in the halcyon days of a West Indian summer, I could sit and muse on the vicissitudes of life.

Forget about it!  In these days of climate change the West Indian summer, like the English summer “hath all too shorter stay”.  For the last month, we’ve had nothing but one tropical wave after another.  If I do find time stroll down to the river, the palm-thatch is more to keep off the rain, rather than keep off the sun.

But I muse nevertheless.  Forty-five years ago, when I gave up a secure job as a design engineer and set out to earn my living as an artist, my mates in the drawing office asked, but what will you do when you reach sixty-five.  Flippantly I replied, that if push comes to shove, I'll go back to being an engineer.  In the last three years, my God I’ve eaten those words many times over. 

Today for instance, when I should have been working on the clay relief of a reclining nude figure, I was instead trying to figure out how to devise a machine for washing tania and dasheen clean enough for export to the UK and US. 

Note:  In this case, Tania and Dasheen does not refer to my two teenage daughters, one  

named Tania and the other nick-named Dasheen, but to two staple Caribbean root crops.

I born here…

When a young West Indian gets a bit stroppy and tells me, “I born here”, my rejoinder is, “Yah, but I’ve lived here longer than you”. 

I first sailed to the Caribbean in 1974 and from the moment I set foot on shore, I knew that here was to be my adopted home.  In the warmth of the tropics, I found colour and vibrancy that previously had eluded me.  However, my love for the region and its people goes deeper than that.   Somerset Maugham, in his book The Moon and Sixpence, expressed it as follows: 

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs.  Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.

This pencil sketch of English Harbour, Antigua, was made when I sailed the Atlantic for the second time in 1980. 



On Ilkla Moor baht ‘at…*

* Translation:  On Ilkley Moor without a hat.

Sixty-eight years ago today, bombs were falling on Bradford.  Two women in the maternity ward of St. Lukes Hospital were put in an ambulance and evacuated.  After a few miles, the ambulance made a stop was outside Harry Ramsden’s Fish and Chip Shop.  It was there that one of the occupants gave birth to a daughter.  Having successfully coped with that little episode the ambulance drove on...until I came into the world on the middle of Ilkley Moor.  

If ever Yorkshire declares independence and becomes a monarchy, I reckon that I (along with the lady who shares my birthday) have the credentials to sit on the royal throne.

The shaping machine shown in today’s picture also comes close to sharing my birthday.  After a couple of years aiding the war effort, it spent a relatively easy life in the testing laboratory of a Sheffield steel works.  When the steel works closed down it was - quite literary - put out to graze.  Ten years ago, I rescued and restored it.  

Along with the lathe, a shaping machine is one of the earliest and most versatile machine tools.  I doubt if many today’s engineers would know a shaping machine if one fell on their head.  My machine has today celebrated its 68^th birthday cutting a replacement gear for the paper feed mechanism at one of the island’s printers. 



Making a start…

Today’s pictures show the beginning of the bas-relief that I am now working on.  First, a sketch of my subject and then, the sketch enlarged and transferred to a 18" x 30" tablet of clay. 

The sketch turned up during last week’s sort out.  As a painting, in my eyes it failed, but as the subject for my bas-relief it may work well.  The next step is to differentiate the highs from the lows.  At first glance, this appears easy, whereas in fact it can be quite a challenge. 



Lost, found and sold…

Continuing my lost and found sequence but adding, “sold” to the list. 

The very fact that for forty-five years I’ve earned my living from my work inevitably means that hundreds of paintings and sketches have sold.  Sometimes I manage to photograph a picture before its new owner carries it away, but prints fade and hard discs fail.  More often than not, a sale leaves me with only a memory.  

On the other hand, I have, in the words of Whistler, “…favourite pictures that have successfully resisted the danger of sale on more than one occasion”. 

Today’s poor quality image is all I have to remind me of one of my best paintings from a series I made of Denise during two pregnancies. 



Traces of love long ago…

Faded photographs,

Covered now with lines and creases.

Tickets torn in half,

Memories in bits and pieces…

Those classic lyrics by songwriters, Buddy Buie, James Cobb and Emory Gordy, sum up my feelings after a week of delving through stacks of old portfolios, photographs and diaries. 

I found paintings that I’d almost forgotten and one unfinished painting that I’ve no recollection of whatsoever.  This is odd because, while I can easily forget most things, I can usually recall every detail of a painting: the time, the place and all manner of incidentals. 

Here is the unfinished mystery.  I would say that it dates from the 1990’s and it has the feel of Europe rather than the Caribbean.  I did make brief visits to France and Portugal.   However, as I remember, on those visits I worked solely in pen and ink, not watercolour.  It is a pity that I didn’t carry the painting through to completion, as it certainly holds promise.

Breaking the mould…

Today’s picture shows the torso emerging from the waste mould.  The pink plaster is the flick coat.  The colour serves as a warning when chipping through the outer plaster.  When making the mould I add a light wash of clay water between the flick coat and the outer plaster.  This helps the one to separate from the other.  Breaking away the final layer requires a very delicate touch, for otherwise the figure is criss-crossed with chisel marks. 

What a luxury it is to have separate spaces for studio, carpentry, engineering and - with plaster flying in all directions - mould making.  My studio in England had everything, including our living accommodation, under one huge barrel vaulted glass roof.

Mozart’s Concerto for Violin in A Major…

If for nothing else, in a hundred years time I don’t mind being remembered for these two sketches. I came across them today as I was sorting through past portfolios.  I made them from the wings of the stage during a concert by the Halifax Symphony Orchestra.  They stopped me in my tracks, and that is just what anything connected with the arts – be it poetry, music or paintings - should do.

Bas Relief…

Do no let us forget that routine is the greatest enemy to art.

With those words of master sculptor and teacher Edouard Lanteri in mind, I have decided that my next sculpture will be in relief rather than in the round.  Before leaving England I was commissioned to a make series of reliefs for a group of historical buildings.  To get my hand in so to speak, I first made this relief of a seated nude.

Afterwards I discovered the freedom of expression that Gustav Seitz (1906 – 1969) gave to his reliefs, as in the two figures shown below.  His work has enabled me to see a way of incorporating the linier sketch in sculpture: in effect, drawing on clay.  That is what I am aiming for.

Incidentally, there are three distinct divisions of relief: high relief, half relief and low relief (bas relief).

Ganosis…

Yesterday, when searching through Ralph Mayer’s encyclopaedic Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques  I came across the word “ganosis”.  It means, the toning or dulling of stone sculpture by the application of colours mixed with wax.  It seems that the technique was also used to reduce the shine of marble, especially on naked parts of statue.  (Don’t ask me why specifically the “naked parts”!)

Can this technique be the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle that I have been searching for ever since I saw the subtle yellow earth tone colours of some plaster casts in the National Portrait Gallery thirty years ago.  I have tried all ways to achieve the same effect, but to no avail. 

In the meantime, what I have become a dab hand at is giving plaster the appearance of bronze.  Indeed, the man who applies the patina to bronze at the Morris Singer Foundry claims that I can get plaster to look more like bronze than he can!  The first picture shows a seated figure in plaster coloured to resemble bronze, whereas the second picture shows an actual bronze cast. 

I am now tempted to try ganosis on my reclining torso – specifically, the naked parts.

Soft soap and horsehair…

For those interested in technicalities, I will continue the saga of making a cast of the torso.

From the plaster waste mould I can take a plaster cast.  To prevent the two plasters binding together, the mould is coated with soft soap. Dish washing liquid is today's equivalent of the soft soap used for centuries by sculptors and washer women alike.  Likewise, strands of glass fibre can be substituted for Hessian and horsehair.  

Plaster can be mixed thin enough to pour into a mould and then swilled around until it sets.  By this means the thickness of the cast is gradually built up.  However, in my experiments with plaster polymers, I have found that a thicker mix and a slower setting time are desirable.  Hence, I brush the mixture into the mould and after a couple of coats add the fibreglass reinforcing.  (Sorry to say I’m out of the pleasanter Hessian and horsehair.)  This is the stage I was at when I took today’s picture.  Once the brush coats have set, I can trowel up to the final thickness of the cast. 



In the beginning…

This week I am sorting out the studio.  In doing so, I’m finding paintings and sketches that I’d almost forgotten about.  Some go back well over 50 years, to the very beginning of my creative endeavours.   Here, to give hope to those following in my footsteps, is my very first attempt at a watercolour.  

I remember making this pencil sketch of the view over Halifax, Yorkshire, during school holidays.  Incidentally, my brother uses a recent photograph of the same view as the title shot for his enthralling “News From Nowhere” blog. 



You horrible little man…

The critic Jean Lorrain accused Toulouse-Lautrec of taking the cult of ugliness too far.  Cabaret performer Yvette Guilbert’s response to a drawing he had made of her was, “You horrible little man”.

With portraiture, it is difficult to resist flattering the sitter.  However, when the sitter is in an irritable frame of mind the artist can mischievously use it to his advantage.  

Here’s an unsmiling, uncombed Denise on a morning when everything went wrong.  As she huffed out of the studio, I could swear I heard her say, “You horrible little man”.



Inside out…

Today I removed the clay from the mould for the torso.  The mould now needs cleaning before making a cast.  From this type of mould only one plaster cast can be made.  This is because the mould has to be broken into fragments in order to remove the cast.  Hence it’s name, Waste Mould.

For me it is facinateing to see the figure inside out – it’s a bit like the visual jolt of reversing a photographic image, but doubly so.  In the 1990’s the sculptress Rachel Whiteread developed the concept of “negative space” in her Holocast Monument and her cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house.

Recently I have found that a body cast - in its negative form - gives a new insight into the beauty of the human form.  This cast is not of a galaxy in space, but of a breast that bears the hallmark of suckling many offspring. 

A messy business...

At the height of his career, Rodin had thirty moulders taking casts from his clay figures.  As for me, I’m sculptor, moulder and labourer rolled into one. 

The method of making a mould hasn’t changed since the time of Michelangelo.  First the figure is divided into sections with lengths of brass shim.  In the case of the torso, it is simply a top and bottom. 

Plaster is then mixed to the consistency of thick cream and flicked on the clay with the fingers.  It’s a messy business.  What misses the clay goes everywhere else.

When the flick coat has set, more plaster is towelled on so as to build up the strength of the mould. 

At least, that’s it in simple terms.  In practice, there are many complications and pitfalls along the way.  It’s a daunting task, because if the mould fails all is lost.

Cleaning up at the end of a day of mould making is what once put paid to the career of one hopeful sculptor sent to my studio for work-placement.  After a couple of days, he went back to college to switch courses.  He found sweeping plaster off the floor “too demeaning”!

Oh, to be in England…

Not so much for April or the chaffinch singing on the orchard bough, but for all the supplies that I can’t get on a small island in the Caribbean. 

Oh, for a couple of bags of fine casting plaster.  In order to make a waste mould from the clay torso I’ve spent the day restoring the properties of a bag a plaster that has a sell-by date of January 2000.  First, I pulverised it back into fine particles then dehydrated it in the oven for a couple of hours at Gas Mark 8.  It’s cooling off as I write.

My wish list would continue with tubes of Winsor Newton Artists’ Watercolours, especially the colours, Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber and Viridian.  On the engineering side of things, a ¼” end mill would not go amiss and while I am at it, a decent pair of shorts – I mean shorts, not those sloppy things that come way below the knee.

While I’m dreaming on, here’s a sketch of an English hedgerow with blackberries.  It's dated the same as my bag of fine casting plaster.

Innocent England…

Today I stumbled upon this photograph of autumn leaves cast in plaster.  Multiplied many times over and cast in bronze they were to have surrounded my innocent – but controversial – National Health Service standing nude.  (See diary page for May 9^th.)  The sculpture depicts spring emerging from winter and the leaves would have formed a vortex around the figure.  However, even a whole host of leaves could not satisfy the prudish NHS Trustees as to the appropriateness of a nude figure in a hospital setting. 



D. H. Lawrence’s paintings suffered a similar fate.  Hence his poem “Innocent England”  which begins:

   
       Oh what a pity. Oh! Don’t you agree

       that figs aren’t found in the land of the free!

       Figs don’t grow in my native land;

      There’s never a fig-leaf near at hand

      When you want one; so I did without;

      And that is what the row’s all about.



In situ…

Today we carried the finished torso from one location to another to see how it looked from various vantage points.  In the past, they often hauled a new piece of public sculpture around the block by horse and cart for the same reason.  For months, the sculptor has become accustomed to seeing the work on the modelling stand in the studio.  To see the work from a fresh vantage point comes as a shock.  Suddenly you see strengths and flaws that had previously gone unnoticed.  A figure that seems large in the studio appears diminutive outdoors.   Those who see the work first in the studio, and then in situ, often asked why have you made the work smaller.

Here is the torso outdoors in the rain.  Through the deceptive eye of the camera she looks lost, whereas in reality she holds her own.  Either way, she contrasts nicely with the pebbles!



Songs for my supper...

It was through necessity that I declared myself as an artist on the pavements of France and Belgium in the late 1960’s.  We had sailed a converted coal barge to France with five pounds in our pockets.  My sketches were our means of survival - songs for my supper.  The courage it takes to set up cap and easel on the pavement is best expressed by the poet and writer Laurie Lee in his book “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning”. 

“Presently I got up and dressed, stuck my violin under my jacket and went out into the streets to try my luck.  I was now or never.  I must face it now or pack up and go home.  I wondered about for an hour looking for a likely spot, feeling as though I were about to commit a crime.  Then I stopped at last under a bridge near the station and decided to have a go. 

I felt tense and shaky.  It was the first time after all.  I drew the violin from my coat like a gun.  It was here, in Southampton, with trains rattling overhead, that I was about to declare myself.  One moment I was part of the hurrying crowds, the next I stood nakedly apart, my back to the wall, my hat on the pavement before me, my violin under my chin.

When I’d finished the first tune there was over a shilling in my hat: it seemed too easy, like a confidence trick.  But I was elated now; I felt that wherever I went from here, this was a trick I could always live by.”

Here is the market place in Bruges, one of the rare sketches from those early days.

Real people...

My subjects are not professional models, but real people.  Elizabeth drives a truck, Ganeen cares for the elderly, Samantha teaches at college and, as a girl, Alice carried bananas bare-foot down the steep hillsides of St. Vincent.

Denise has been my wife and model for twenty years.  That is not to say that she spends her days at ease in the studio.  She does the work of three men on our two and a half acre estate.  Nevertheless, despite hard work and five children - or maybe because of it - her body grows even more appealing with the passing years. 

This afternoon Denise was welding stainless steel cutting discs for a prototype food-processing machine – the latest of my inventions.  Behind the mask and beneath layers of protective clothing is the face and figure that has featured on so many of these diary pages.

Re-inventing the wheel…

Sculptor, Edouard Lanteri (1 November 1848 – 22 December 1917) taught modelling at the South Kensington Arts Schools.  Towards the end of his life he wrote a series of three books, explaining the art of human and animal composition in sculpture.  The books were re-issued in 1965 (new edition 1985) as two volumes, Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure and Modelling and Sculpting Animals by Dover Publications.  They are regarded as the definative texts for those wishing to pursue the figurative.

With the exception of Lanteri’s work there are few other sources of information on the techniques of past masters.  Rupert Gunnis’s Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660 – 1851 contains almost 12,000 entries.  So much information on the sculptor’s working methods has been taken to the grave.  So much has been irretrievably lost!

Inevitably, I constantly find myself re-inventing the wheel.  Just occassionally I find a clue, such as in this rare photograph taken in Rodin’s studio.   The stand enables the model to hold and revert back to a pose. 

From clay to plaster…

The reclining torso that began my diary pages way back in February has now progressed from clay to plaster.  Normally, I do this by taking a plaster cast of the clay.  However, what you see in today’s picture is a polymer plaster copy that I have made by measurement rather than by a mould.   

I doubt if many other sculptors have used this technique.  Measurements are transferred from clay to plaster with the pointing device shown in the photograph.  It is similar to the way in which a clay original is copied in marble - but instead of chipping away to the final form, I’m building up. 

The process is long a tedious but it gives me the freedom to develop the work as I go along, for the copy need not rigorously replicate the clay.  The second picture shows the surface texture in detail.



A knot there's no untying...

Thomas Cambell’s poem, Freedom and Love speaks of the impossibility of binding love to last forever.  Perhaps encapsulating the passion in bronze, as with Rodin’s lovers, is as close as we will get.

When I began my sculpture for the City of Leeds, my models were devoted newly weds.  Alas, by the time the sculpture was unveiled, they were divorced.  Those who have suffered the pain of divorce know how difficult it is to look back at even a photograph, let alone to be confronted for eternity with a life-size image in bronze.

Here they are, forever in love, “in a knot there’s no untying”.



The embrace...

In the drawings and sculptures of his later years, Rodin developed the interplay of two figures embracing.  The blend of eroticism and idealism in his “The Kiss” makes it one of the great images of sexual love. However, Rodin considered it overly traditional, calling it "a sculpted knick-knack following the usual formula".

I can relate to his misgivings, for whenever I attempt to bring two figures together the end result poorly reflects the ardour that I intended.  Somewhere along the way, the passion of the embrace is diminished rather than intensified.

When I was sketching the UK’s Northern Ballet at rehearsal, the English National Ballet staged Derek Deane’s Romeo and Juliet.  The director sent me this photograph of the principal dancers, Thomas Edur and Agnes Oaks. 

From that day to this, I have been sorely tempted to make that striking embrace the starting point for a sculpture…and this time to retain the passionate mood of the moment.

No lines at all…

I am beginning to realise that working on a large scale has a disadvantage when it comes to reproducing the paintings on these diary pages.  The intricate fusion of one wash running into another is lost.  To compensate, here is a detail from yesterday’s painting.

 

To continue the theme of lines: here, with no lines at all, is a detail from a painting I made today.  I made the preliminary sketch in watercolour and allowed the outline and washes to merge as they may.

Which comes first…

To answer the question posed yesterday by Honest Abe:  “Not sure which came first, the colour or the ink.”

Generally, the line comes first, but what you are seeing is pastel, not ink.  Over the years, I have tried almost anything that can make a line on paper: pencil, ink, charcoal, conté crayon, ball points and all manner of felt-tips.  Just before leaving England, I stumbled upon Pitt Pastel Pencils.  They are made by Faber Castell and work beautifully with watercolour.  I find that I can even apply them to wet paint, so sometimes I might strengthen a line as the painting progresses. 

In yesterday’s painting, I put the line down with point-breaking pressure.  In today’s painting, I used a lighter touch.  Once again, I'm working on a large scale (20" x 30")

That's more like it…

Painting in watercolour is not for the timid.  Contrary to popular perception, there’s nothing refined and dainty about it.   It takes courage to give a wash the freedom it deserves.   Moreover, watercolours need not be limited to the pages of an 8” x 10” sketchpad.   My large watercolour boards measure 30” x 40”.  I confess that beforehand my nerves are on edge at the risk involved.   That size of best quality board doesn’t come cheap!

Today I took courage – granted on a sheet of regular cartridge paper – and pushed the boundaries of size, colour, line and form for all they are worth.  When I turned the painting for Denise to see, her comment was, “Mm, that’s more like it”. 



While the bread rises…

Today offered a score of excuses for not getting back down to painting and sculpting.  Not least was Denise’s determination to do the week’s baking.  Without a model, I’m stumped.  However, as followers of my diary know by now, I can work fast and I can take my subjects as I find them.   So, when Denise said, “Okay you’ve got fifteen minutes while the bread rises.” I grabbed my chance.  

     

Therein lays the challenge…

After weeks of being sidetracked I am now determined to put all else aside and get back to “hands on” painting and sculpting.  I say “hands on” because no matter where I am or what I am doing, my mind is continually interpreting what I see.  These pent up visions give me the thrust I need to get going again.  In addition, the spaces between one spurt of effort and the next, helps to prevent me from falling into a rut.  If only my visions could be fulfilled in practice! 

For years, I have been trying to give my sculpture the freedom and spontaneity of my sketches.  This seems to be in the realms of impossibility.  How can a sculpture that takes days, weeks or months to create equal a sketch that has taken a matter of minutes?   Yet therein lays the challenge for next week, next year and for the next twenty years.  In the meantime, this sketch serves as a reminder of what I am after. 



A hybrid chair…

Today I took one look at a long list of priority jobs, said to heck with it, and made a chair. 

It was born out of humble circumstances.  Some weeks ago, the electricity company did some tree felling in the valley.   They carted away the good stuff but left behind a pile of off-cuts.  Denise, never one to let anything go to waste, gathered up their leftovers and out of her stash of spoils, I sneaked the pieces I needed.

As the chair is intended for the paved area down by the river, it as something of a curious cross between a three legged milking stool and a Windsor Chair.  It’s the kind of thing a country carpenter might have put together a hundred years ago.  In those days, a carpenter may have found time to embellish his creation with a touch of affection – just as I did before putting down my tools for the day.