Show Me The Treasure

 A little while back a request came in for women poets in Prussian Blue. While I may not appear cooperative, if an esteemed friend ( which does suggest a steamed friend but en ought of the malaprops) asks for me to make or write something it is as I have been hypnotised, and I off I go, like an automaton.  So, here is Charlotte Mew (1869-1928),  this redo makes her look less pinched than the photograph it is taken from, which I think is only fair, since fortune dealt her a diminished share. Read her ‘Rooms’,  it is my favourite.  

 A little while back a request came in for women poets in Prussian Blue. While I may not appear cooperative, if an esteemed friend ( which d...

The cherubic babe in Fra Angelica's lovely portrait is worth studying, for the coloration of the cheeks and the fine shadows of the i...

Usually with  these redo's of photo's in Prussian Blue I note who photographed whom. But here while I'm thinking Rasputin, those dark eyes, the cyanotic mouth, I've no notes just that unlovely and  overly large date. 

Usually with  these redo's  of photo's  in Prussian Blue I note who photographed whom. But here while I'm thinking Rasputin, t...

Continuing in my pursuit of rendering my favourite authors, or photographs, or both together, in broad strokes of Prussian Blue this redo is based on a wonderful photo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez makes a little hat, a kind of half-way house, out of One Hundred Years of Solitude, at once alluding in its proximity to the source of the 'Cien Anos' genesis, and perhaps suggesting that, best seller that it is, it goes quite some way in providing a roof over Marquez's head.

Continuing in my pursuit of rendering my favourite authors, or photographs, or both together, in broad strokes of Prussian Blue this redo ...

Last week I finished Andrea Levy's Small Island, a compulsive read, sometimes bleak, more often funny, it illuminates, mostly in a kind watery grey light, a pivot point when the British Empire comes 'home' to roost. The central characters Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie, and a mostly off-stage Bernard have a nearly Shakespearean feel to them, their own soliloquies, their inner chatter areall  great revealers of  plot and character. Gilbert at times might be the grave digger in Hamlet, an irascible and noble clown, Hortense a kind of unrelenting Jamaican version of Elizabeth Bennett, not in her circumstance but in her high handedness, while Queenie is an enigma, an English rose who becomes too literally a metaphor for the Mother Land. Levy's ear for the vernacular is wonderful, the sense of place vividly cinematic.
The Prussian blue redo of a photo of Andrea Levy doesn't do her justice, which is a pity, as the perversity of what goes by as 'justice''  is a central themes in Small Island.
Coda: I stayed up far too late and watched the BBC version on DVD, really well done, but read the book first!

Last week I finished Andrea Levy's Small Island, a compulsive read, sometimes bleak, more often funny, it illuminates, mostly in a kin...

  In the ongoing project of retakes on photographs of famous writers, Sigmund Freud is arresting on a number of levels, though the scr...

There is an elegance to Rilke that survives even his translation into Prussian Blue. Unwittingly I've drawn his ears too large, but that is all the better to overhear the conversation of angels.
This set of Prussian Blue sketches has made it over the line between a set and a series, though I speculate that perhaps some of the Blue-ed in characters from the Robert Capa series may well have been poets. 

There is an elegance to Rilke that survives even his translation into Prussian Blue. Unwittingly I've drawn his ears too large, but th...

The first thing I think of when I see Frank O'Hara is his poem 'The Day Lady Died' which walks the reader through a hamburger and a malted, a  nickel shoe-shine (the nickel is my detail), toying with the idea of buying Les Negres by Genet, Gauloise (the French thing was obviously big) and finding Billie Holiday's face on the New York Post - announcing her death. O'Hara doesn't quite take the news on the chin.  Perhaps more on the forehead.

The first thing I think of when I see Frank O'Hara is his poem 'The Day Lady Died' which walks the reader through a hamburger ...

This is another blue derivative taken from a photo of Rimbaud at 17, where he has already hit his poetic straps, twenty years before his death, and three before he abandons his vocation as a poet. Though he looks glum, even melancholic, I suspect that his work 'to systematically derange the senses' might have been more fun than doing an MA in creative writing.

This is another blue derivative taken from a photo of Rimbaud at 17, where he has already hit his poetic straps, twenty years before his ...

Like learning to whistle, sooner or later, an interesting note occurs, and for me, this might be one of them . ( Though one note doesn't make a song, to paraphrase the swallow.) So,  here is Yeats, mis-cropped, with present ears and eyes and nose, but his mouth is out of frame, busy elsewhere with words on paper.

Like learning to whistle, sooner or later, an interesting note occurs, and for me, this might be one of them . ( Though one note doesn...

The Phoenix palm - Fibonnacci-ist of the garden - somehow always manages to be centre stage, even when it's leaning North-North-East. It will be no surprise this is done in prussian blue, and a calligraphy brush, a great lesson in the difference between the beginning and the end.

The Phoenix palm - Fibonnacci-ist of the garden - somehow always manages to be centre stage, even when it's leaning North-North-East. ...

When do you stop? That is in the context of when do you stop an exercise that had become something between a habit, an indulgence and a compulsion.  Here is the last  drawing on the last page of the 40 page notebook, which I started on the penultimate day in May with a drawing of Bart Brassica, and then shortly after took up the Robert Capa Prussian Blue Project. Not all the drawings have been blogged - some are too busy, the odd landscape orientation by and large fails, there are some ring ins, Brussels sprouts, beagles  and a tap. I am still not tired of Capa.  This fellow here, with his close study of the page, his angled foot exuding enjoyment, his shadow impastoed to the page might well be any diligent reader, such as oneself.

When do you stop? That is in the context of when do you stop an exercise that had become something between a habit, an indulgence and a co...

So, it is the continuing study of Robert Capa, his photo of a boy watching a parade for the commenoration of the annexure of Belgium. Whatever is passing before him and the rest of the crowd in the original photo, including the woman next to him with a very elegant hat, it does not inspire joy. Here one small bit of wash got away from me, and in that mending way one proceeds in before I knew it the whole thing had taken on the aspect of a negative. That odd negative effect, of meeting another version of yourself, feels nostalgic, an intriguing state of being not at all yourself.

So, it is the continuing study of Robert Capa, his photo of a boy watching a parade for the commenoration of the annexure of Belgium. Whatev...

Ok, so the title here is a chintzy rehash of 'The Use of Marigolds By the Man in The Moon', but perhaps the fellow, described in the Complete Photographs of Robert Capa  - from which this drawing take as its source  - as a Japanese radical leftist may agree with me.  What is starting to puzzle me more and more is the relationship between photographs, memory and drawings. If this sketch prompts me to recall,with clarity, the photo was which is was taken, why do photographs of dead friends subsume the real life images we have of them?

Ok, so the title here is a chintzy rehash of 'The Use of Marigolds By the Man in The Moon', but perhaps the fellow, described in the...