Hulks

The drawings are developing particularly with the Dickens' text. I've been given a copy of the new biography of Dickens which I've just started reading. It's quite helpful to understand the construction of such wonderful images through words that Dickens created. My last post was called Devastating me to the Hulks. This was in fact, a misappropriation of his phrase 'devoting me to the hulks. It was only when I showed a drawing to Rick which was based on this phrase, did it come to light that I had made this error. When I looked at the drawing, I had mutated between the two phrases. I have found that repeatedly writing one phrase is actually quite hard because my mind wanders in the process and it becomes quite an hypnotic action. I am usually listening to the radio when I am drawing and I find that words from the radio leak into the drawing and I have to then make sure that I reconnect with the Dickens phrase.

I have just completed the longest drawing in time in this series so far. I have worked the phrase 'devoting me to the hulks' into an A1 drawing on tracing paper. This one was more sensitive to gradations of pencil and I worked a lot in 2H & 5H. Part way through I began to ponder on the existence of prison hulks that lay out in the estuary during Dickens's lifetime and what an eerie and strange sight they must have been. Years ago, when I lived in Rochester, I visited the Guildhall Museum which had an scene from the prison hulks with fake prisoners laying in hammocks and a sound of creaking and groaning in the background. My elder daughter used to love this part of the museum and was hungry for the drama of it. So I decided to consider incorporating the hulks in to my latest drawing and have used the same repetitive writing technique to create subtle silhouettes of the hulks as though they were strung out on the estuary on a flat river with no movement. I can imagine the fog and peppery mist clinging to them and oozing into their planks.

I have taken the hulks and begun applying the image to some previous small drawings on Japanese papers. I've used graphite for these which has given a smudged inky quality. I am quite pleased with the way the paper has absorbed the powder.

devastating me to the hulks

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I've been doing a series of drawings in response to text from Great Expectations by Dickens and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. They are based on repetitions of selected words and phrases from the books, which are continually written and rewritten to create a drawing. I started the first ones on tracing paper which is a material that I love. As the surface builds up the pencil marks become more and more shiny and glossy. The words that I kept coming back to were mostly from Dickens's G.E. ; marsh mist is so thick and devastating me to the hulks. I was also working with a phrase from Conrad's novella; i lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet - drills- things I abominate, because I don't get on with them..
It's really fascinating to work with a minimal amount of the text in a continuous way. You begin to lose it's context and it is hard to keep track of the correct pattern of words after having written it for the thousandth time. Even thought the text is being obliterated and becoming illegible through the drawing, I still had to hold onto the correct phrase and way of writing it, trying to keep a continuity going.
It becomes mesmeric.