Soaking off Grim Island

Caption: Top image: 'final image', second image 'halfway through post work', bottom image: 'pure render image w ithout post work'

Okay, sorry to be away so long: Ugh.

Without further ado I'd like to state that my real reason for being away from my blog is:

a) I fell overboard (port side)  from my yacht 'Reginaldus Rogerina.III" and was eaten by a baby Blue Ringed Humpback whale who mistook me for a giant cooked prawn (I was sunburnt). I was only released after eight non stop hours of  singing Barry Manilow songs at the top of my voice.

b) I've been holding my breath taking part in the World Breath Holding Championships off Tahiti and came second with a time of eight hours, seven minutes and twelve point 2 seconds. Part of my prize was to act as a human bean bag at the following week's Sudoku wrestling championships.

c) I had my finger stuck in the tap and couldn't get it out till the local green grocer got in a supply of Aldo Moro Cold Pressed First Virgin Olive Oil from Mt Ararat..

d) I was kidnapped by some sardine eating Tasmanian terrorists wearing black pantyhose on their heads (the kind with the sexy zipper seam at the back of the leg). 

e) I have been making a book that I actually finished.

f) I was mistaken for Barak Obama and locked away on a desert island by a bunch of  deprived and depraved echidnas looking for a fun time and the answer to the riddle of the Spinx: ("What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?")

g) I was arrested for misspelling both 'handkerchief and 'miscellaneous'  in one sentence. (The old fat man sat on the small thin boy to make sure that he couldn't escape with the pale green handkerchief and the other miscellaneous frippery.)

h) all of the above.

Sorry, that's enough miscellaneous frippery for one post.....

 To be honest I was lucky enough to be included in an Artists's Book Exhibition which opens on 11th June here in Newcastle. You can see part of my work here. It's about Fairy Tales in the modern world with specific emphasis on feminine stuff that I don't understand ....

Just kidding. To quote from the official site: 

An exhibition of artists’ books at the John Paynter Gallery, Friday 10th – Sunday 26th June 2011, and Artspace Mackay, Friday 22nd July- Friday 28th October 2011, curated by Caelli Jo Booker and Helen Hopcroft.

The exhibition is conceived as an interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, writers and craftspeople invited to work together to create handmade books which explore female narratives within the fairytale genre.

While the classic fairytale ending ‘happily ever after’ envisages a single, finite destiny, the contemporary feminine experience encompasses a multiplicity of roles, expectations, endings, beginnings and relationships. Thus the exhibition theme is probably best conceptualised as a celebration of diversity within destiny, with the fairytale genre used as the narrative vehicle to explore this idea. 

I started work on the book two months ago. It's an accordion folding book. And it's now longer than my living room (about twenty metres plus). I've also adapted it for the Blurb format  and it's come out at 74 pages...... I never know when to stop.

But one of the items in the show is to illustrate a specific scene in a book named Cape Grimm.

So the top image illustrates a moment where the "Holocaust Preacher is Taken by Giant Squid."

I made it this morning in between scrubbing the kitchen and ironing my shirt for work - so it needs some fine tuning especially round the thighs/legs where they are vanishing into the darkness.

The other scattered images are part of the finished work. With thanks to some of my friends. You know who you are! :)

Thanks again for looking at my work and your patience with me.

King Canute

One of  my favourite painters has, for a few years, been Edward Hopper. If you are familiar with his work you know that Hopper, for all his greatness, rarely paints a good human figure. They are too pale, or too bent, or too angular or too.... just not right.

But for  all his faults he has succeeded in describing the essential isolation of humans from each other. A typical Hopperesque painting might have two or three figures in an enclosed environment, each facing away from each other, as if the others did not exist.

In his paintings the protagonists are so close - and yet so far.

Though Hopper places his people in American  environments of the 20's and 30's, logic tells us that this inability to bridge this isolation has been part of human nature since we started as a species.

So thank you Hopper for the inspiration.

And of course that leads us directly to our subject - King Canute. (Well it doesn't really, but I will pretend it does.)

If you are like me, you probably don't know that King Canute, also known  as Cnut, won the English throne in 1016, just 50 years before the Norman 'invasion.' Again so close, and yet so far.

With all the things I know about the Normans (funny helmets, arrow in Harold's eye, Hastings, Bayeaux tapestry, the Droit de signeur) I know nought about King Canute - except that, try as he might, he couldn't stop the encroaching tide.

That isn't to say I don't think about Canute quite often.

In fact I do - most often when I am having my morning run along the beach and my shoes are wet from a sudden surging wave that has caught me unawares.  To be honest, usually I've been daydreaming about making up some scary monster that I can scare kids with in my next 'illustration" - rather than taking in 'the moment'. 

So serves me right.

And to be more honest, at six o'clock this morning, this illustration started as an illustration about a bent and gnarled tree. At about half past six, the tree became an island. At a quarter to seven the island became inhabited with Canute, who refusing to leave the seaside, has been caught by the encroaching tide.

Originally Canute was staring out to sea, on his lonesome. But then I realised he needed more.

He needed enigma.  So at ten minutes to eight, just when I should have been ironing my shirt for work,  I introduced the figure on the right - and suddenly had more than a story. I had drama, plot points, metaphor and balance - not just the balance of composition, but the balance between age and youth, gluttony and moderation, stoicism and distress.

And another figure to clothe.

Oh well.

The final image is below  this text. The dark clouds are above the youthful figure, the light is on the King's old and swollen face.

I wonder what it means?

And I wonder which one is me?

Thank-you for looking. Again. Clicking for big in this case give accidental almost "photo-realism". Something I strive against.

Oh well :)