The
Enchantment was partially inspired by the above mentioned Cat Stevens,
specifically
his "Buddha and the Chocolate Box" album, further specifically:
the songs "Music," "Jesus" and "Home in the
Sky." Apart from the enchantment of music (of today), the heart
of the theme is the Doppleganger legend, elucidated, by my intellect,
memory and opinion, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in "How they Met Themselves," drawn
sometime around the late 1850's. And its chemistry is Death and Re-lncarnation.
I suppose I seem quite stuck on this topic as all my pictures, with the
exception of The Sepia Horseman and The Four
Ages, deal in varying ways
with the twisting of Time and Space, Life and Death and ultimate re Creation.
Something ic waes being the major statement. A screwed up copy of one
of my last Marvel books, "The Black Hound of Vengeance," that
can be seen laying in the bottom right corner of Enchantment, seemed
quite apropos to re-birth.
Linda's
tour de force this year was the production of Shelf Stuff, (though
if she manages to fit the entirety of this lengthy article into the
4 pages afforded it for this catalogue, what you're holding in your
hands might be considered
an ingenious coup). |
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When
I produce a picture, or a book or somesuch, I, like some others, usually
do many roughs and designs before arriving at a workable
solution, sometimes initial drawings bear little resemblance to finished art,
as ideas have a way of escalating and metamorphosing around here. After eight
months or so of publishing finished work, we had literally stacks of shelved
drawings and designs, thus the choice of title, Shelf Stuff,
for the compilation of merely fifty of those unused sketches.
Although
some mistakes were made with its concept (as a book) it was approached
with a "cost is
meaningless" attitude. Being our first book form publication we got very
excited about its possibilities. One of them being multiple execution. Pandora was a step toward that, in that it was five colour, the gold border being the
fifth colour, printed twice on each separate print. It was above and beyond what
is expected of any "Poster" (unless you were living eighty years
ago when Lithography was a proud art). Shelf Stuff, being a multiplicity (pages,
plural, instead of a singular image in a print) caused us to naturally consider
the cover to be a different entity to the interior. |