Carol Savage Artist Printmaker

Carol Savage Artist Printmaker

I am an artist printmaker mainly using the collagraph process.

Rachel Rose Reid 03/12/2022

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From "Silence" by https://www.rachelrosereid.com/

“The Roman de Silence, was written down in 13th century Cornwall, and rediscovered in 1911 in a box marked “Old Papers, No Value.”

"King Evan of England declares that no women may inherit land in England. So, when Silence is born, - a descendent of King Arthur no less - she is raised as a he. Silence becomes a minstrel, a fugitive, and a knight, with Merlin somehow always nearby.

"As a young girl, Queen Eufeme is ‘gifted’ by her father as a bride for King Evan. She becomes a stereotypical, ruthless, evil Queen, threatening Silence’s life. But the story meditates powerfully on the consequences of gender oppression, and I think that our narrator wants us to consider what circumstances might lead to the existence of this ‘evil’ Queen.” – Rachel Rose Reid

Beyond Words is a series of twelve prints made by C.A. Savage, each a response to a storytelling show performed at Beeston Tales by a visiting artist during 2018-19. In these videos, the prints are combined with voices of the tellers as they revisit the story that inspired the image. By Tim Ralphs

Rachel Rose Reid On the radio they said that Hans Christian Andersen wrote the Little Mermaid whilst he was avoiding the wedding of the person he loved. I thought 'that doesn't sound like a story that involves singing lobsters'. Published by Burning Eye Books, I'm Hans Christian Andersen strips the sugarcoat from t...

03/12/2022

Beyond Words is a series of twelve prints made by C.A. Savage, each a response to a storytelling show performed at Beeston Tales by a visiting artist during 2018-19. In these videos, the prints are combined with voices of the tellers as they revisit the story that inspired the image. This is the last posting for this project which has been four years in the making and involved Mike Payton, Tim Ralphs ( both of Beeston Tales) and photographer and film-maker Laurence Mason-Guetta.

03/12/2022

King Begon sent messengers scurrying to discover what crime his country had committed but no reason could be found.

All he could do was defend.

For months and years England raged and Norway burned.

Towns turned to ash, villages vanished, bodies broken, souls scattered, undefended in the fields the peasants died and the crops rotted on top of them.

This is what King Begon grieved as he sat in the damp barren dining hall, he was at one end for the long feasting table opposite his only child - fourteen year old Princess Eufeme.

They picked at their dinner of green breadcrumbs

Nothing seems to stop this King Evan, King Begon wondered. What does he want? What does he need that he’s not already got? What could endear us to him? What could turn his face to another direction, what could lead him to sing songs to a different tune?

She is old enough.

And she is beautiful.

21/11/2022

May
‘Eufeme Waits’
From ‘Silence, Part 1’ told by Rachel Rose Reid
There were two women in this two-part story, one empowered, and the other oppressed and powerless. Eufeme is the latter, a young woman in an arranged marriage over which she has no control or consent waiting to be picked up by boat from Norway to be married to Evan, an English king. I saw her as a lone tiny figure, full of life and potential, in an unfriendly, rather barren and oppressive landscape, with a storm brewing. Her life is not going to be easy or happy. The story is from a manuscript discovered at Wollaton Hall and suppressed because of the powerful central female character. I never got to hear the second part. The landscape was inspired by the print and manga works of Hokusai which I had just seen at the British Museum, and the illustrations of Tove Janson, whose work I had also recently seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. She herself was inspired by Hokusai I think. Some new techniques were used to make this landscape of stark contrasts

18/11/2022

The story of Tamlin is a story of the steadfastness of love to release the bewitched Tamlin from the spell which binds him. Janet holds fast to Tamlin as he changes from one terrifying shape to another and finally he is restored to her as the human father of her child.

15/11/2022

APRIL
‘Janet tied her skirt so green a little above her knee’
From ‘The Howken Field’ told by Nick Hennessey
It was hard to choose a story from Nick’s set as so many images came to mind as I listened. I knew this story best as a ballad sung by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer on ‘Child Ballads’, but Nick used a very similar phrase for this moment just before the fateful picking of the rose in the wild garden of Tamlin. The story is, I believe, rooted in the Middle Ages so I took inspiration from images of women from that period and also Pre-Raphaelite paintings. It has a stylised and formal structure but I hope the magical wildness is suggested by the trees, taken from my drawings of real trees. It is another two-plate print with chine collee and painted elements (called ‘a la poupee’).

14/11/2022

Anston Line is the story of Steve and Julie, recently married, awaiting their first child, rushing some home improvements in a small English Midland town. Feeling privately a little overwhelmed, Steve often goes walking along Anston Line, a disused mining and steel foundry area on the edge of town, now overgrown and forested. There he keeps meeting a rather confused old lady who keeps asking for Jack. She wants to know where her Jack is. And so Steve, without really intending it, draws Julie into a quest to discover who the strange old lady is, and how she can find her Jack. The search takes them to older and more remote time and place than seems possible. It also takes them right back home.

07/11/2022

MARCH
‘Looking for Jack’
From ‘Anston Line’ told by Simon Heywood
A ghost story with a ‘real’ ghost story depicted in it. The protagonist meets an elderly woman ‘looking for Jack’ one twilight by the abandoned railway tracks and finds out the backstory to his ghostly encounter. A friend told me about a house he had looked at online and during the video tour of the house he found the image of a ghostly figure, an elderly woman. I watched it too and it was spooky. What was spookier was that she was identified as the deceased owner of the house as she appeared in life walking along the street, and the image appeared on the spot where she had died in her chair! She was perfect for the image of the old lady ‘looking for Jack…..’ and is drawn from ‘life’. It is a two-plate black and white image to evoke vintage photographs and this made it easier to superimpose the ghostly Mrs O. She looks a bit like my Nana too.

05/11/2022

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From "Mangoes on the Beach" by Peter Chand. https://peterchand.com/

A greedy, farmer readily agrees to supply some of his ripe watermelons to Parvati as she is very thirsty. He takes one from his own pile and steals two from his neighbour. Parvati gobbles up the delicious fruit and Shiva grants the farmer endless wishes until the sun sets that day.

Amongst the things he wishes for is a beautiful white horse, faster than the wind. It suddenly appears galloping past. A moment later he hears galloping from the neighbour’s farm- and unsurprisingly there are TWO galloping white horses flying by.

So it continues, for every wish he makes the neighbour gets twice as much. Finally as the sun is setting the malicious farmer wishes that he only had one arm. The poor neighbour loses both arms. So it continues until the neighbour, through no fault of his own loses all his limbs, and sight, and finally drowns. The Greedy farmer is still there today surrounded by so many beautiful things, but is he happy?

Of course not as he still hears two horses galloping next door, two fountains shooting water into the sky, two peacocks calling out. And he still feels the neighbour has more than him. All he possesses himself, is still not enough.

Punjabi folktale told to me by my brother Satish Kumar Chand.

31/10/2022

FEBRUARY
‘Two white horses’
From ‘Mangoes on the Beach’ told by Peter Chand
I was ill with flu (the normal kind) so the telling had aspects of a dream for me. All that was clear in my mind were some melons, some peacocks and two white horses. Northern India where Peter is from, is famous for its textiles but the motifs of peacocks and horse in this print are Medieval European. I thought this blend of two cultures worked because Peter framed his tales with an account of his family’s move to the UK in his childhood. I still wanted the feel of tapestries, important in both traditions, so the peacocks are a subtle suggestion in the background of the two white horses, as if they are on a fabric background. The melons fell by the wayside. Less is more. The ink on the plate was modified with a stamp I made of the peacock motif and the pure white horses was achieved with a stencil then another plate with the black outline. It was complex!

30/10/2022

Erysychthon summary

Erysychthon, the arrogant King of Thessaly, cuts down Demeter’s sacred tree and is cursed by the goddess, with the help of her enemy, Famine. The emaciated figure kisses the sleeping King, leaving a little piece of herself nestled in his belly.

Waking with an insatiable hunger, Erysychthon eats everything in his palace and is left with nothing but his daughter, Mestra. He sells her into slavery but Poseidon gives her the power of transformation and she is able to escape, only to be sold in various forms again and again by her ravenous father. Eventually she returns home to find him dead in the garden, the flesh of his arms stripped away as he ate the only thing he had left to satisfy his cursed hunger - his own flesh.

30/10/2022

Some weeks bac k I tried to upload the video of Mike Payton's story of Erysichthon. Tried several times but it didn't work so as it is the Season of Terror, here goes again. I told this story to my grandsons aged 7. They were suitably horrified but there were questions: 'How can someone eat themselves?' and 'Is there a pair of teeth flapping around endlessly eating?' It's Hallowe'en so, hey, yeah!

27/10/2022

Steve Katon summary

A boy lived with his grandfather in a seaside shack on a beach. Every day the boy went outside the shack with his rod and fished to feed the pair.

A giant arrived to steal the boy’s catch. After a week of this, the boy worried his grandfather would starve to death, so confronted the giant with his grandfather’s steel net, trident, and an old silver helmet (his grandfather is revealed to be an old monster slayer).

The giant laughed and prepared to kill the boy. ‘Stop!’ cried an old voice, ‘Let me show you how it’s done.’ It was Grandfather, and rather than offering to fight the giant, he was offering to teach the giant to fish.

Which he did, and the giant and the old man became friends.

24/10/2022

JANUARY
‘Let me show you how it’s done’
From ‘New shoots and old roots’ an original story told by Steve Katon
I tried several incarnations of the giant who is being taught to fish. He comes down from the cliff to the sea’s edge so I saw him as made of rock, as many giants are, being often part of the landscape. The difficulty with the composition is getting a huge figure into an image with a much smaller one, so he emerged as a kind of giant boulder behind the fisherman. The fisherman is based on my late husband, a keen fly- fisherman. So flyfishing rather than sea fishing, and Jed’s baggy trousers. A bit of poetic licence there. Some experimentation with texturing the inks on this one to give the impression of stone.

20/10/2022

Here is the summary of this week's story and a video with audio track of the print. Thanks to Sarah Rundle for the story and Tim Ralphs for the video.

20/10/2022

A Kitsune (Magic Fox) and a Tanuki (Magic Badger) have a shape-shifting competition.
The Kitsune goes first. He transforms himself into a beautiful maiden, who wins the affections of a Samurai. The warrior proposes marriage to the maiden, and on the day of her wedding she is led in procession through the streets by drummers and retainers. Briefly, she is unattended, and spies a tempting little dumpling discarded on the ground. Unable to overcome her foxy impulses, she bends down to devour it, whereupon the dumpling sprouts arms, legs, and a hairy tail. “I win!” says the Tanuki.

17/10/2022

DECEMBER
‘The Tanuki saw the Fox-woman’s tail’
From ‘Naughty Japanese Badgers’ by Sarah Rundle
Images of Tanuki, a mythical Japanese animal as well as a real one, in woodcuts from Japan emphasise a key feature of the Tanuki- namely his enormous testicles! Not shown in my print as I want children to be able to view the prints too and it basically looks like a weird cushion! I love Japanese woodcuts, so was familiar with their composition and stylistic elements, like the treatment of vegetation. I made it a diptych with the Tanuki spying from one window and the tricksy, mythical Fox-woman, given away by her furry tail, and in my image, her revelatory shadow, in the other. I used chine collee (adhering paper elements to the print image during the process) with Japanese papers for fabric details, though her wedding kimono is white as in the story. These plates are not collagraphs like the others. I used dry point, where a metal plate is etched with a sharp tool. It is best for this graphic work.

13/10/2022

NOVEMBER
‘Still his hunger gnawed at him’’
From ‘Erysichthon’ Told by Mike Payton
This story of an uncontrolled appetite for war and conquest leading to the destruction of a sacred tree and a terrible curse resonated with me because of my environmental concerns. Initially I was thinking of uncontrolled consumerism and some themes from my earlier work such as ‘The Redundancy of Progress’ and ‘Balloon’, but eventually a portrait of the maddened king, his grotesque hunger and yet still starving figure made me look for faces I could adapt for the portrait, with the dead tree behind him. Black and white seemed right for such a tragic image. Making a face like this in collagraph made me explore a new technique to sculpt the face.

11/10/2022

NOVEMBER
‘Still his hunger gnawed at him’’
From ‘Erysichthon’ Told by Mike Payton
This story of an uncontrolled appetite for war and conquest leading to the destruction of a sacred tree and a terrible curse resonated with me because of my environmental concerns. Initially I was thinking of uncontrolled consumerism and some themes from my earlier work such as ‘The Redundancy of Progress’ and ‘Balloon’, but eventually a portrait of the maddened king, his grotesque hunger and yet still starving figure made me look for faces I could adapt for the portrait, with the dead tree behind him. Black and white seemed right for such a tragic image. Making a face like this in collagraph made me explore a new technique to sculpt the face

10/10/2022

We are halfway through our year of stories this week with a suitably bleak image for November. I would like to thank my fellow collaborators and friends who have worked so hard to bring this project online with me. Mike Payton, whose story is this week's offering, and Tim Ralphs, both hosts of Beeston Tales where I heard the stories in the first place. And Laurence Mason-Guetta who took the photos. Tim makes the videos which are shared every Thursday/ Friday on my page, Carol Savage Artist Printmaker. They are well worth watching and listening to the audio clips from the original storytellers. Mike's story is a good one for Hallowe'en!

06/10/2022

For many years there was a little car park behind Bristol zoo on the edge of Durdham Downs*. The place was attended by an old fellow who never said a word. You'd throw the required coin in his bucket and he would nod his chunky old head and that was the procedure. But then one day he wasn't there. Officious employees at the zoo called the city council, alarmed that the facility would be unattended and vehicle owners could easily take the occasion to start parking willy-nilly over the grass. But it turned out that the council had always believed the attendant to be in the zoo's employ... And thus it was that Bristol realised that the well-known car park attendant was actually no such thing! He was just an old chancer with a bucket. And how do Bristolians feel about his little ruse? They love him for it! They love to picture him reclining on a beach someplace, happily retired on the strength of his dubiously-procured coins.

This large common is a popular tourist attraction, bordered not only by the zoo but also that gorge so famously straddled by Brunel's iconic suspension bridge.

06/10/2022

OCTOBER
‘The Car Park Attendant kept the cash in a bucket’
From ‘The best urban legends in the world’ By Will Mertens
A car park attendant who every day collects the money in a bucket for a car park which turns out to be entirely made up led to me doing some on site research in Bristol. Driving around trying to find images showed me the problem the Attendant has cannily keyed into – you can’t park in Bristol! Street after street of houses with row after row of cars on both side of the street led to this image- a steep street with a church at the top and cars chock-a-bloc. Finding the composition to bring out this was the challenge as I had to stand practically in the traffic to take the source photo. The car park attendant is depicted as an absence- is he real? Is he dead? Is he a ghost? Is the story true? Can I ever find a parking space in Bristol?

29/09/2022

Wild Aunt and the Purblind Boy

In a raging storm, Wild Aunt is struck by lightning.
Her purblind nephew hears her wails and searches for her.
He could just make out blue lights like static flicker round her.
Wild Aunt flinched and twitched but didn’t die.
When she wakes up, she runs, limbs crackling,
‘I have a thirst on me. I could drink the ocean!’
When Wild Aunt falls, or flings herself, into the sea, the boy throws out his hunting stick to her to save her but it strikes her and lodges in the bone between her eyes. Wild Aunt becomes a narwhal and the boy, his eyes scrubbed with stinging seaweeds regains clear sight.

26/09/2022

SEPTEMBER
‘Wild Aunt held out the magic seaweed to Purblind Son and then sank into the depths’
From ‘The Girl who married a Dog’ told by Nell Phoenix
This Inuit story is set in Arctic seas and at about this time I saw on ‘Blue Planet II’ images of the marvellous corals and plants that grow in those seas, something new and strange. They form the focus of this image. I firstly researched the Inuit people themselves and their faces and clothing. Purblind Son is saved from drowning by his self-sacrificing and magical Wild Aunt. She holds out the magical seaweed which will cure his blindness before sinking into the depths. It didn’t seem to lend itself to a detailed portrait of the two of them. The seabed had taken my imagination and the magic is lent by a little touch of metallic silver in the inking.

22/09/2022

Stories remind us that demons were a reality in medieval Jewish life. Young unmarried men were in constant danger of being visited, as they slept, by a demoness who would appear, while they dreamt, to literally "milk" them of their 'emissions'. Poor physical health would result.
Married men were also at risk. If you ran a business or trade; had a large cellar, a seductive demon queen might move in there, making you a slave to her desires, and she in turn would make you rich. But you should never speak of it - on penalty of death. You'd foolishly agree, but rarely did it end happily.
How did mere mortals cope?
"Yea, the night monster shall repose there and find herself a place of rest."

19/09/2022

AUGUST
‘Why did her husband keep going down to the cellar?’
From ‘The hair in the milk’ told by Sef Townsend
You know a story set in an inn called ’ The Devil’s Head ‘is not going to end well. The innkeeper beguiled by a demon disguised as the Queen of Sheba, is found by his curious wife in delicto flagrante in the cellar- ‘why is he spending so much time down there? And why are we suddenly so prosperous?’. I love the comedy of this moment- he very pleased with himself with this too-good-to-be-true liaison, and his poor, rather drab wife, who has not benefited in any way from his change of fortunes, in the background. It’s all about to kick-off and he doesn’t know it. And why would the Queen of Sheba be bothered with a little ugly, tubby innkeeper? Ah vanity! I didn’t show her face (or anything else) because how can one depict legendary beauty? So all we see is her luxuriant hair and the rest is left to the viewer’s imagination. There is quite a lot of fiddly chine collee in this one and some shaping of the ink on the innkeeper round belly and face. It is also dark and murky because it is a rather grubby liaison after all.

15/09/2022

THE GIRL AND THE SNAKE WITCH

A quiet life by the lakes in the ancient forests of Finland. A brother, a sister, and a loyal dog. Such a happy ending isn't enough excitement for some, so Brother sets out to seek his fortune. But when he promises an unwilling Sister as wife to the King, everything falls apart.

Brother and Sister find themselves mired in the darkest of Finnish folk dangers, a grim tapestry of cursed kings and castles, oubliettes and unsettling sea creatures, and, weaving through it all, the pale, terrifying and seductive figure of Suyettar, the Snake Witch.

12/09/2022

JULY
‘Long straight hair as grey as pale ash, big dark eyes as grey as smoke’
From ‘The Girl, the Snake Witch and the Grinning Castle’ By Sara Liisa Wilkinson
Water, particularly running water, in stories and folk lore is often a revelatory element. It sweeps away glamour and witchcraft, as it does in this image where the true nature of the devilish Snake Witch is revealed in the reflections in the lake. The witch in her deception appears as innocent and her lines are all straight but the trees and the reflections show her true serpent nature. You can find a different perspective on the Snake Witch in the poem ‘Lamia’ by John Keats. The trees were taken from real trees and the inspiration from the Danish illustrator Kay Neilsen, with a bit of Art Nouveau influence. This is one picture that came fully formed as I listened to the story.

08/09/2022

Tim Ralphs has created a video which contains an audio clip. The clip is an extract from the original story. As Tim told the story that inspired this print, the voice is his.

Laurence Mason-Guetta, photographer and filmmaker, took the photos for this project and Tim has used the photos to make the videos. Remember to turn the speaker on!

06/09/2022

JUNE
‘She walked for a day and she walked for a week and she walked for a month and she walked for a year’
From ‘How to spin enchantment’ told by Tim Ralphs
This tale of female endurance and perseverance has several incarnations that I have heard. For me, the silhouette of the small woman set against an enormous landscape signified the scale of her task- to keep walking until she finds her soulmate and solves the problem through her own resilience. The mountain landscape dwarfs her: though it has beauty, within it are dangers and obstacles to be overcome and the journey will be long. The textures and forms within this print are the more usual techniques that I use in my prints, but the clear blue sky (representing for me her eventual triumph) and pristine white snow were quite hard to achieve.

04/09/2022

My latest online gallery, 'Beyond Words: A year of stories' a story telling collaboration with 12 storytellers, launches here and on Instagram on 6th September. Instagram@beyond_words_gallery. Watch this space for one new print a week for 12 weeks.

04/09/2022

‘When things are uncertain, stories come in’ Nick Hennessey
Having lost my partner and finding my art practice as a fine art printmaker had stalled, I became Artist in Residence at Beeston Tales, a thriving storytelling club in Beeston, Nottingham, with the challenge to make one print a month, based on that month’s storyteller, for one year.
Storytellers come from all over Britain to Beeston. The stories told come from the treasure of stories from all the nations and traditions of the world. It resulted in a body of 12 prints and led to much development of my usual technique of collagraph. I will outline for each print how I developed the work.
This is a collaborative project: Mike Payton and Tim Ralphs, storytellers and hosts of Beeston Tales, have worked alongside me to bring this project together, in the face of many challenges, and refocus it online after Lockdown meant no ‘real world’ event. They are two of the twelve storytellers who have now generously retold extracts from their original story. You will hear the voices of these twelve here. They have also shared a precis of the story itself, the bare bones if you like. You can follow us as we post one print and one storyteller a week through the Autumn of 2022.
C.A. Savage

04/09/2022
03/09/2022

Coming soon! My online gallery Beyond Words. Launches 6th September on Facebook and Instagram: beyond_words_gallery. Watch this space!

03/09/2022

Coming soon! My online gallery of a collaborative project with Mike Payton and Tim Ralphs, storytellers of Beeston Tales. It’s called ‘Beyond Words’
Launch date: 6th September. Watch this space!

The Carp at the Dragon Gate 21/11/2019

The finished print in situ, outside view, night.

The Carp at the Dragon Gate 19/11/2019

Documenting making a large-scale print 2014 (possibly 2013). I made this large-scale mono-print on Kuzu paper for a site-specific installation at LCB Depot, Charles Street, Leicester. It was the culmination of a project at the Leicester Print Workshop which saw a group of print makers meeting over many months to talk about their work. We were each assigned a space for a print, creating an arts trail that took in venues from around the Cultural Quarter of Leicester. My space was a glass cube gallery and it looked just like an aquarium, hence the fish. I used a Buddhist teaching called 'The Carp at the Dragon Gate' from the Goshos of Nichiren Daishonin, which is an allegory of ordinary mortals aspiring to, and over-coming the obstacles to, attaining Buddhahood. The fish had to have an 'attitude' of determination and courage, which I hope I have achieved. It also had to work from both sides as it would be viewed form inside and outside the gallery. I had already discovered that Kuzu paper absorbs ink in such a way that both sides are the same. It was constructed as a Japanese hanging scroll and supported by fishing line to be invisible so it would seem 'swim'. On the launch night I was delighted to discover that the lights inside the gallery made the fish glow in a very beautiful way

The Redundancy of Progress 19/11/2019

The Redundancy of Progress

This body of work began with the examination of a broken cassette recorder. Like so much out of date technology, it was due to go to the tip. Yet the intricate and beautiful nature of its workings still held a fascination.

This cassette recorder had once been a glossy and desirable thing, the latest ‘must-have’, but its original purpose had been removed. It was now an object merely. Its fabulous complexity had been superseded, yet was worthy of contemplation in its own right. Eventually it might become an artefact, excavated long into the future without a sense of its original purpose or context.

The trajectory of this object is regarded as ‘progress’ but, for me, mere technological advance is no progress at all. The waste, the discarding of one ingeniously fabricated device after another, the move from useful to useless, seems only substitution: ultimately a valuing of the material over the spiritual. The imagery here, then, is one of disconnection, dead ends, and the action of time.

This is implicit in our own story, which we view as a linear progression from savagery to civilisation, yet is in effect a substitution of one set of powerful elites by another; of one gadget with another, with no real ‘progress’ for us as human beings in our sense of ourselves, our relations to each other or as one culture to another.

The transformation of the individual, society and the environment towards value and harmony would be, for me, real progress.

Perfect Motion 19/11/2019

2013 This series of prints was inspired by elite athletes, gymnasts and divers. Based on drawings of the movement of their bodies in slow motion television coverage, I have sought to capture the motion and finely honed performances of sportspeople at the top of their game.
I, like others, am captivated by the effort and dedication needed to fine-tune each aspect of a leap, run, or twist to achieve perfection in space. It is the forms of their movement, rather than medals or placings that I find intriguing.
These prints freeze frame trajectories in sports like long jump, pole vaulting, high jump and many others.
I have used collagraphs, which is a favoured technique of mine and, in addition, I have used mezzotints for the first time. Mezzotints are an old technique of working from dark to light which seems to suit the sculptural possibilities of a body at a single moment: a gymnast at the moment of dismounting, or an athlete at the point of releasing all their energy into a jump. Viewed like this, we observe the body in forms which it would be impossible to hold in more straightforward life drawing. It achieves a plasticity which at times seems incredible, yet always full of power and grace.
These prints seem very different to previous work as they are figurative, but have arisen out of a life-long interest in life drawing. I was keen to develop my life-drawing practice beyond the usual poses found in workshops, where a figure cannot be expected to hold very difficult poses for very long, and the context is often unnatural. I was interested in the dynamic moving figure and so have used slow motion TV coverage of the Olympics and other sporting events to work with. I have drawn on the work of Degas in this respect after a visit to the recent Royal Academy Exhibition last year. He in turn drew on the photographs of Edweard Muybridge.

Videos (show all)

King Begon sent messengers scurrying to discover what crime his country had committed but no reason could be found.All h...
The story of Tamlin is a story of the steadfastness of love to release the bewitched Tamlin from the spell which binds h...
beyond_words_gallery's profile picturebeyond_words_galleryFrom "Mangoes on the Beach" by Peter Chand. https://peterchand...
Some weeks bac k I tried to upload the video of Mike Payton's story of Erysichthon. Tried several times but it didn't wo...
Steve Katon summaryA boy lived with his grandfather in a seaside shack on a beach. Every day the boy went outside the sh...
A Kitsune (Magic Fox) and a Tanuki (Magic Badger) have a shape-shifting competition.The Kitsune goes first.  He transfor...
For many years there was a little car park behind Bristol zoo on the edge of Durdham Downs*. The place was attended by a...
Wild Aunt and the Purblind BoyIn a raging storm, Wild Aunt is struck by lightning.Her purblind nephew hears her wails an...
Stories remind us that demons were a reality in medieval Jewish life. Young unmarried men were in constant danger of bei...
THE GIRL AND THE SNAKE WITCH A quiet life by the lakes in the ancient forests of Finland. A brother, a sister, and a loy...
Tim Ralphs has created a video which contains an audio clip. The clip is an extract from the original story. As Tim told...

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