Dyslexia is not the best ability when it comes to proof reading. It took four reprints of my book Virgin Island Sketches to purge my spelling mistakes. And the more recent device of word prompting doesn't help. I sign off my personal emails with "Rog" only to find that behind my back it had been converted to "Dog". The cheek of it!
As you might guess, I'm doing the final proof of my forthcoming book "Voyage Into Ireland". The illustrations are more in my line and today's picture is a sketch I made fifty years ago of one of the Barrow Navigation lock keepers.
For my book "Voyage into Ireland" the gestation period from conception to impending birth has been fifty years. By comparison my book "Notes on the Nude will be with you in next to no time. The embryo showed the first signs of life two years ago and it has been growing ever since.
The collection of notes and images will give an insight to my lifetime's experience of working from the nude figure. As with my watercolours, the text will suggest rather than define. I will put down 75% and then leave you to read between the lines.
Through these diary pages I will keep you updated on work in progress.
It takes only a matter of seconds for my model to twist from one position to the next. My task is to get that elusive moment down on paper - in a matter of seconds.
Maybe you can't make head nor tail of the end result. But I can, and equally important, my models understand what I am attempting to portray. We hope that one day the rest of the world will cotton on.
Fifty years have passed since making the voyage that is the subject of this book. The manuscript that began as an up to the minute guide is now an historical document. Like the canals, it is a miracle that it has survived.
When my original publisher to put the book on hold due to financial restraints in the early 1970’s, the typed manuscript took off on an amazing voyage of its own. It twice crossed the Atlantic aboard small sailing boats, survived storms at sea and two major hurricanes on land. For years it languished on a shelf in my studio, all but forgotten about.
Between making the voyage and retrieving the manuscript, there is a time lapse of half a century. During those intervening years the inland waterways of Ireland developed beyond belief. What was then abandoned is now restored and the navigations upon which we once sailed in solitude are now popular cruising grounds. I have resisted updating the text in memory of those earlier idyllic times.
