Rolling Road

A title like that takes me back a long time to the ' Golden Age' of science fiction and a writer long since out of favour called Robert Heinlein - he wrote a massive future book  The Roads Must Roll -which described a society whose transport involved progressively faster travellators moving in parallel until the inner ones were at very high speed- fascinating and imaginative concept. I only later began to realise how fascist and racist was his writing.....as my own political awareness grew.

Here is where I am now:

 

First colour

The key block again

 

The first colour overprinted onto the key - later we will see the results of the other route

 

When I was finished the other day there was some black left so I dug up and old block which suggested something to me:

 

 

...and here is my first effort at blind embossing -something I have wanted to try for ages -thank you Pam for adjusting the pressure on the press.

 

We had a discussion yesterday about the assessments (Jan 8) and it was requested that the blog contain references to our sources -well most of mine are documented in my contextual notebook which will be upgrade further over the holidays but let me here refer to a few interesting people and points.

 

An artist who first I looked at simply for his anti-establishment stance in Germany at the beginning of the 20c I have now come to have a huge regard for is Otto Dix:

 

 

This is a self- portrait and is immediately seen to be different than his caricatures which are quite similar to Georg Grosz. In my context. nb. I have some much more elaborate examples.

 

The other artist I would like to write about is Lucian Freud.

He may not, at first sight appear to fit in with my briefs and ideas but let me explain a little. I have been fascinated and a little repelled by his portraiture for a long time and in fact one of my earliest paintings when I returned to work was a copy I made of one of his self-portraits:

 

 

 

 

 

 (haven't got the copy to hand now but will add in both later). There is a certain lubricity (is that a word?) about the flesh quality in the portraits particularly  the nudes:

 

but there is absolutely no contesting the brilliance of the paint  - what might perhaps be at issue could be the artist's motivation. To me there is more that a little similarity with some of Bacon's work in that there is a distortion  - the artist might argue for honesty but the human might suggest cruelty.

Chance would have it that London Review of Books (LRB) has a review by Julian Barnes of two new books on Freud and the writing has so impressed me that I intend to keep this for my contextual notebook. Barnes' view of Freud not uniformly positive and accords somewhat with what I have been saying. Anyway, I intend to put these two gentlemen together in a collage and we will see what eventuates.

(Just to compound  this I found an Irish Arts from 2007 in the top of the bin in the studio  and who is on the cover - Freud.  The articled inside will be retained for surgery.

Enough of this self-indulgence  -off to do some more work.