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1492 (Memento Mori) 462 x 400 pixels, 60 Kb
Drawing to a Conclusion 365 x 450 pixels, 51 Kb
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My drawings continue on average to be on a larger scale than my paintings. Rima's Wall is still the largest work I have made except for the Mappin Art Gallery installation. The themes of musical notation and imagined scripts seem to be a constant factor with occasional excursions into more referential subject matter as in the drawing 1492 (Memento Mori). The title of the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition (Drawing to a Conclusion) is taken from a drawing where erasure is the principal mode of marking marks, as if to return to the original sheet of paper were the goal. Some recent drawing have been made with mud which I have been collecting on my travels, although what I have mostly used comes (as does that providing the roundels for Peckham Heads) from my garden. Some drawings continue to explore musical themes, in which ghosts of staves and notes appear (as they do in the Birtwistle portraits). In the pastel drawing 1492, which popped out of the pre-Columbian blue for the quincentennial, the skull links dreawing to other current preoccupations, as A Winter's Tale reflects an excursion into the world of theatre design. Thus all concerns, motifs, notations, symbols and orthographies migrate in my work as, in ways I scarcely control, they always have done. There is no plan or strategy that makes a text from A Humument (begun in 1966) form part of a painting (Curriculum Vitae), translate itself into wire sculpture in 1996, decorate a CD cover also in 1996 and in 1996 end up as part of a wire sculpture, which may or may not be its resting place. Sacred and Profane / Drawing to a Conclusion (1997), pp. 21-24. See also: Large Drawings (to 1992)
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