central park

A view of the duomo of Siena

A famous view of a famous building. How many tourists to Siena turn the corner by San Domenico and stop to see the city rising like barnacles on the opposite hill? I know I did.

This etching is based on a pencil drawing I made on site, which you can see here. I made a quick watercolour as well, as the sun went down. See it here.

Note how both watercolour and drawing show a mirror image of this picture. That's because the process of etching flips the image.

Siena

This is not the only picture I've made of Siena, or even of the Basilica di Servi in Siena, but it might be my favourite. It's an etching, made on an aluminum plate, but based on a pencil sketch I did on site.

The colour comes from chine collé, a technique in which a thin sheet of paper - hand tinted tissue from Japan in this case - is pressed into the paper support of the picture by the etching press.

The picture was etched and printed at the Open Studio in Toronto.

Santa Maria di Salute, Venice

A view across the quay and the loitering gondolas at the vast baroque church of Salute. It's the kind of view that's been done a thousand times but remains irresistible.

It's an etching, about 4" by 6," printed at the Open Studio in Toronto, Ontario. The uniform blue was applied with a technique called chine collé, in which a layer of tissue-thin tinted paper is laid down between the etching plate and the support paper.

Whitney Hall in winter

It's only October, but it feels as if winter is already upon us. There are many good things about Canada, but the weather is not among them.

This is more of a February scene, though; it's a Georgian style block that serves as one of the University of Toronto's prettier colleges. It's also, I think, the only one from the 19th century that isn't dressed up in  typical campus gothic revival. I love faux-medieval architecture as much as the next person, but some variety is nice.

Woman with a knee brace

A rather sparse composition from a few years ago. The processes of physical injury and recovery can be visually fascinating, perhaps because of the asymmetry they often force on the body. The human form is resonant in our visual part of our brains; it is the easiest shape for us to pick out in any environment, which is why camouflage works not, as is often thought, by blending into the background, but rather by breaking up the recognizable outline.

I wanted the design of this image to reflect the asymmetry of the injury, as well as its arbitrariness. Perhaps it would have been better if I chopped off the leg altogether, but that was not the state of the model. Nor, of course, would I wish it upon her.

It's an etching on zinc, printed at the Open Studio in Toronto.

Black City

A sombre, high-walled city looking over the waters of the bay.

This city has no name, but like other pieces in this series, it emerged from the pool of fantastic stories I read as a teenager.
Which means we can make a list of its sister cities, each of which has a name that will do for this one. For example:

"Distant, twin thunderstorms played to either side-north over the Inner Sea and south above the Great Salt Marsh-as they approached that monstrous city and as its towers, spires, fanes, and great crenelated wall emerged from its huge, customary cap of smoke, being somewhat silhouetted by the light of the setting sun, which was turned to a dull silver disk by the high fog and the smoke."

"On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting."

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counter-part
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

"But the windows of Andelsprutz in her houses looked vacantly over the plains like the eyes of a dead madman. At the hour her chimes sounded unlovely and discordant, some of them were out of tune, and the bells of the some were cracked, her roofs were bald and without moss. At evening no pleasant rumour arose in her streets."

"Over the irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."

The city is not ruinous, although
  Great ruins of an unremembered past,
With others of a few short years ago
  More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement        
In house or palace front from roof to basement
  Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

…At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
  A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
  Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:              
He murmured to himself with dull despair,
Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.

And of course:

Per me si va nella citta dolente.

Well, I could go on. Dreadful cities are dreadfully common. Nonetheless, they retain a certain allure.




Quotations in order of appearance:
Fritz Lieber, The Circle Curse.The city of Lankhmar.
H.P. Lovecraft, Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. The city of Dylath-Leen. Which is also, apparently, a French metal band.
Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. No name for this one, just the Dark Tower.
Lord Dunsany, The Madness of Andelsprutz.
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan. Gormenghast, which is called a castle, but is clearly a city.
James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night. This one is London.
Dante. And this one is hell.

A Christmas Card

I made this screen-print for the Open Studio's Christmas fundraiser a few years back. It's based on a china-maker drawing of Danielle from the daily sketchbook.

Montaubon

Some years ago I visited the small, russet-coloured town of Montaubon. My objective there was to visit the Jean-Dominique Ingres museum. It was a disappointment. Its contents - donated by his widow to his hometown - consist of the leavings of his studio and various other bits and pieces he was unable to sell.

None, in short, of the fabulous portrait drawings that make up his most interesting body of work. Nor any of the great paintings either.

But the trip was not a waste. Just a bit north of Toulouse, Montaubon is likewise built entirely from the pinkish-red local brick, and is quite beautiful. My favourite spot was the place de ville, a square courtyard completely enclosed by a double arcade that lent it a homey, almost claustrophobic, appeal.

A good place to hide from the afternoon sun, and one in which people were constantly appearing and disappearing, as if by magic, behind the many columns.

I made this etching of it at the Open Studio in Toronto. It's approximately nine by six inches, and printed on 140lb. Somerset cotton-rag paper, in an edition of forty. My main interest in the composition was in capturing the sharpness of the afternoon sun.

Il castello di Frosini

A very small etching that I recently made at the Open Studio in Toronto. It's just over an inch tall.

There's a certain pleasure in miniaturization. I've always wondered if it's the same enjoyment we take in high-density imagery, such as Russian icons or paintings by Gustav Klimt - the sense of too much information crammed into too little space can be very enticing.

In any case, I starting making the tiny landscapes because there's often no time for a larger drawing, especially when you're cycling across Tuscany.

This scene is of the castle and small hamlet of Frosini (population: 45) in the Province of Siena. It rests on the flank of the low mountains dividing two fertile river valleys. The road in the picture has, with various pavements, served as Siena's main link to the sea for over a thousand years. In short, exactly where you would expect to find a castle, and indeed, it first appears in history in an 11th century document.

A century or so later it belonged to the Knights Templar, and then to the city of Siena. These days, it's privately owned. I'd love to see the inside of the castle.

San Giacomo in Paludo

Below Thebes

The Egyptian Thebes, not the Greek one.

I make pictures like this, and in my head they're accompanied by some suitably lyrical poem on the theme of things lost and forgotten. In this case, given a subject matter both Egyptian and maritime, a kind of hybrid of Ozymandias and Ulysses.

Although now that I'm thinking about it, a line from Lord Dunsany's The Idle City also comes to mind: "And for how long he is silent. Only the other day I met a king in Thebes, who had been silent already for four thousand years."

Well, perhaps all that is too heavy for such a slight picture. It's a small drypoint, about 6x6 inches, printed in an equally small edition.

The orchard at Settignano

Settignano is a village just north-east of Florence, famous for the villa I Tatti - once the home of Bernard Berenson and now Harvard's centre for renaissance studies - and also for quarries. The villa is visible in another small etching, here.

The orchard in this picture is down the hill from the village proper. And I was walking, for a change, not cycling.

This is a tiny etching - the image is only about an inch tall.

The Silence

The Canal of Giudecca

as seen from a window of the Doge's Palace.

It's an etching on zinc, printed on hand-coloured Japanese tissue on a support of rag-cotton European paper.

An aluminum etching

An early experiment with etching into aluminum with copper sulphate.

To make etchings from aluminum plates is to abandon many of the advantages of the medium; etching in copper or zinc permits incredible precision and lines of such fineness they could never be produced with a pen. Moreover, both metals are of sufficient hardness that large numbers of proofs can be pulled without significant distortion of the design.

But the reaction of copper sulphate with aluminum is far more violent than those that occur with zinc or copper. Lines become blotted and uneven, while open surfaces are pitted and moon-like. These take ink well, but delicacy is impossible. Worse, the softness of aluminum means the proofs will loose quality  quickly.

On the other hand, aluminum is light, easy to manipulate and relatively cheap. And the roughness of the etching process produces a crude and spontaneous effect that I like a lot.

Failure of Chance

This is a picture about not getting what you want. Or more precisely, it's about the risk implicit in desire; how sometimes acting on what you want doesn't get you what you want, and how taking a chance is not always the best course of action - no matter what your friends might urge.

The etching is from a series about the fallibility of desire and the fundamental inefficiency of human communication. As in physics, where entropy attends every energetic reaction, so in life misconceptions and misunderstandings accompany every human interaction.

It's a largish print, etched on aluminum and worked over with watercolour. There's others from the series here and here, and a related painting by Tarragon here.

The castle at Murlo

A tiny etching of the castle at Murlo - a dainty Tuscan village a short way south of Siena. I didn't stop to visit: this is the view from the road, and I still had a fair way to cycle on that day.

The Endurance

I distinctly remember my first discovery of Frank Hurley. The photographer of Shackleton's epic 1914-17 antarctic expedition, his photographs, printed using an old glass-negative process, have a resolution so high it's almost painful to look at them. His image of the Endurance illuminated at night is famous, but I prefer his panorama of South Georgia, which for me captures the impossible bleakness of the place in a way words never can.

Such things were on my mind when I made this small drypoint:

The print was done rapidly on vinyl and printed on Japanese paper in a very wee edition of 7 proofs. It's about five inches square.

Blois

Looking up at the Cathedral of St.Louis in Blois, France. The cathedral, a 17th century building graced with charming modernist stained glass, is not the most interesting or impressive sight in Blois. But the confined view up the hillside stairway is one of the most striking.