Debussy, collage version
Collage, 12 x 15 cm, 1976
Debussy, screenprint version |
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This is an as yet unfinished series of hommages to the many composers whose music moves or interests me. They are done in a random order as the right material turns up, each of them lying dormant for a time until some particular element can be found. Thirteen so far exist: Back, Elgar, Schöberg, Berg, Chopin, Sibelius, Wagner, Mozart, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Cardew, Debussy and Schumann. The six illustrated here were transposed into much larger silkscreen prints with the help of Chris Betambeau and were thus liberated from decay (in that the originals do not take permanence of materials much into account). Each features the face of the composer in question except for Chopin who is represented by hand. Somewhere in the vague past I was asked if I would contribute illustrations to an encyclopaedia of music. I know I could not equal the beautiful pictures of composers that used to grace the Oxford Illustrated Companion (Brahms making his morning coffee etc.) but thought that, via collage, I could bring in another kind of circumstantial detail (Schönberg's tennis racquet, Elgar's horse-racing etc.). I got so involved that I hardly noticed the demise of the publisher that had originally suggested the project.
Click here for additional Composers (to 1992), 108 Kb.
Works and Texts (1992), p. 126-27.
POST SCRIPT: 1997
Most recent collages have either been based on crosses or on the musical stave, usually using fragments of a very battered old set of wartime Picture Post magazines.
The occasional series of homages to composers (started in 1978) made a recent short spurt with four additions. Roughly the proportion of a television screen, their bordered format gave rise to the frame-within-a-frame schema that characterises A TV Dante which I directed with Peter Greenaway in the 1980s. > >
More from the Composers series, 98 Kb
Drawing to a Conclusion (1997), p. 21.
