This is Day 3 of the Instagram #tendaychallenge and I was nominated by su@bonfanti, who was a part of my ‘Artists’ books journey’ ten years ago. I would like to nominate @ronniecruwys. I am posting on my blog to add information to my Instagram posts.
Day 3
If I don’t mention my years as a lettering artist / book artist, there will be a massive gap in my story, even though the theme is The Colour of Landscape. I guess my for much of my artistic career, my landscape was words, fine lettering and gilding.
I am honoured to have a piece of work in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. This is Pythagoras QED and is a graphic illustration of the Pythagoras theorem.
You can even count the little squares to work out that a-squared + b-squared = c-squared. In the orange and blue ‘diagram’ on the right, there are 36 squares in the ‘orange block’ and 64 squares in the ‘blue’ block = 100 squares in the block where the colours go from orange through to blue, gradually changing in colour – all going form saturated to shaded back to saturated. The middle diagram is in the complementaries of yellow and purple and the left diagram is in red and green.
My mathematical quest lasted a few years culminating in more painting and drawing and fewer words – in Nautilus, the quotation means ‘Although changed, I arise again the same’ This is inscribed in an alphabet I designed, using an 8H pencil on gold leaf.
This was my final piece of word art – Vesica Pisces. Earth and Heaven intersect creating the fish shape, but this is also symbolic of man and woman, and the roots of a tree and the foliage. Night symbolises Woman and Day symbolises Man. I used a collage an hand-printed rice paper over watercolours and combined it with Italic ‘He is the sun, she is the moon’ and drawn letters – In the whole wide world it is only he and she.
I knew by then that I needed to go back to my fine art roots and do pure painting; but I wanted to try various media en-route. I blogged for five years about this journey, through watercolour, printmaking, Japanese woodblock printing and finally… oil painting.
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