I have very nearly finished the gigantic task of reviewing my records of past art work. (The rubbish bin is now full of old paper!) What an interesting experience art has been. The greater part of this morning was passed in going through, in a preliminary way, a large portfolio of my earliest work. This really has been a voyage of discovery …. indeed, into the unknown. I have unearthed items I did as a student in the early ’60s, and my tentative explorations with abstract work, abandoned quite soon because I found them so unsatisfactory. My favourite pieces, I think, are designs a did for some recruiting material for my former university department, based upon the cartoon series Magic Roundabout. There are so many avenues down which I didn’t go.
In that respect, one of the most interesting discoveries has been the number of portraits I did in the past. Some of these do show promise, and I am not sure why I didn’t continue with that genre, heading off into landscape instead. A part of the morning was also spent in returning to storage a reduced selection of my life-drawing work. I couldn’t help but notice how much attention I give frequently to the head and face of the model. Many of these drawings are, in fact, portraits rather than figure drawings. There is no doubt that I have found faces to be consistently interesting, often leaving the posing figure (supposedly the main focus of the exercise) as little more than a sketchy hinterland to the face.
At the moment I find myself in a kind of “holding pattern” between bouts of creative activity. I have no further intentions with respect to the reference material I collected during my visit to Derbyshire. So it does look as if it could be quite productive to explore portraiture rather more systematically. We shall see!ortraits