No: I don’t mean that I’ve swapped the lady with the crystal ball for the one with the tarot pack. I’ve tried using watercolour pencils for the first time.* I have poked about a bit with these in the past, primarily using them as a sketching medium. This week I decided to give them a serious work-out.
My current project is based upon the ancient religious image of the Green Man. This appears quite frequently in old churches in this country (and possibly other European countries also) primarily as a decoration on the capitals of pillars, and as “roof bosses” at the junction of beams. They consist of human heads from which foliage is emerging, usually from the nose or mouth, but elsewhere also. There has been a lot of argument about what these actually signify, and there are strongly contrasting theories about this. The image has fascinated me for many years, but this is the first occasion on which I have tried to use it as an artistic theme.
I have tried to link the general idea of the Green Man with the old tradition of a “language of the trees”, according to which different trees symbolise different ideas.** I have chosen six different trees and used their foliage as the basis for images of human heads representing a diversity of attitudes towards religious belief. (This is probably not the best occasion to develop this theme, and I might well return to it on a subsequent occasion.)
I have drawn the basic outlines of each design in indian ink, and then applied the colour using pencils. Really I am quite pleased by the result. It turns out to be relatively easy to develop quite subtle effects, but also possible to achieve more intense passages. There are 72 pencils in the set, so it is not necessary to spend a lot of time mixing paint in a palette. You just do it on the paper. I’ve had the most enormous fun over the past three days, and it isn’t over yet. The images are all pinned up on the board in the studio, as I absorb the extent to which they might require modification or refinement. No doubt photographs of the finished product will be appearing somewhere on this website in the near future.
Already I have an idea in mind for a new picture, using the same medium, but seeing if I can push it it a quite different direction.
*Derwent, if you’re a techie.
**Robert Graves writes about this in considerable detail in his famous book, The White Goddess.