Sail Away

Sunday Bridge

"An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to a as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never becomes quite familiar to you."

~Thoreau

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.

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 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.

Sargent's Sunday Mass

Sigmund Freud:

"Once, as I was roaming the unfamiliar and deserted streets of a small Italian town on a sunny afternoon, I found myself in a district whose nature could scarcely be in doubt. At the windows of the little houses, only painted women were visible, and I quickly turned around and quit the street as soon as possible."

"But after wandering aimlessly for a while, I found myself on the same street again, where my presence began to attract attention. My rapid retreat had only one result: after several other vicious circles I found myself in the same place, for a third time."

"At this point I was seized by a feeling I can only describe as disturbing, and I was happy when - having given up any further attempts at exploration - I found myself back in the square I had left just a short while earlier."

Of course, for Sargent, such a thing would have happened not on sunny streets, but dreary Venetian ballrooms.

The quotation is from Das Unheimliche, in Freud-Studienausgabe (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), vol.3, p.228.

untitled (Ulysses)

A drypoint that's diminutive both in size and in print run; it's about 4 by 6 inches, and I only ever editioned 7 of them. It's printed on a thin layer of Japanese tissue overlaid on a support of sturdy European paper.

The retro styling of the technique and the paper supports the subject matter: a brig with sails struck, waiting out the calm. It was only after I completed the picture that the thought of the sailors sitting out there, wondering when they would return home, suggested the Greek myth.