R26 Raven Creature

R26 Raven Creature
10x14" designers opaque & watercolour
Corporate collection

It's a metaphoric creature, a human face, fishy parts, feathery parts, wing tips, and scaly clouds. There is no raven, as such, but the fishy part does have an odd thick-looking beak.

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R25 Rose Writing

R25 Rose Writing
10x14" designers opaque & watercolour
Corporate collection

May 27, 1987

I'm working on a small watercolour, R25, Rose writing/drawing with Raven. It is in the most muted pastels, grey, flesh and blue. It is lighter than air, made of airy spaces with only a darker underside, just showing. Raven, in this picture, is disappearing, making way for something else.

This picture has no meaning, really. It is just part of that blending-edge, brushed over and fanned outward to become other thoughts and concepts. The shapes will alter; the colours will change. But the artistic intent will always be the same. What a quest my brush is on. What a trail my pen makes. What an illusion my shaded colours give. What a story!

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R24 Nuclear Creature

R24 Nuclear Creature
36x24" oil on panel

Here the checkerboard becomes three-dimensional, heaving up in irregular thrust faults, the upheaval of a threatening world. The order and pattern of life is broken up, but out of the disorder and threats (missiles, darts, dark birds, like omens) there arises a new creature.

March 24, 1987
New panel on the easel. A new beginning. I have taken my time on the drawing, trying to interpret my mental state, give birth to a little being that is not man or woman, but an artistic spirit. Brave little artist, hissing up through the fissures and angles of a warped set of blocks, erupting in a flare of wings like black fire; sensing something out there, analyzing data. Defiant. This is the little spirit that I am painting.

22 June 1987
Completed the oil painting, R24 , after working on it all day and most of the evening. Most of my recent drawing s and watercolours have the same motif, an ambiguous creature rising up out of chaotic, fragmented surroundings. These are pictures that I may not like in the future, but they are essential products of my thought processes at the moment. It is as though my purpose were to take apart what I have been doing (origin) and examine every piece (fragmentation) and come up out of it with a new vision (eruption). All my creatures are pushing, reaching, climbing, striving. Out of confusion, one vision.

Eve was bent over her new picture, etching lines into the wet oil of the under-painting with a stylus.

“What is that?” Allan asked.

“I am trying to interpret my mental state,” she said without looking up. “I’m making a little being that is not a man or a woman, but an artistic spirit. A brave little artist,” she indicated a creature with the point of her stylus, “hissing up through the fissures and angles of a warped set of blocks, erupting in a mass of wings…they look like black fire, don’t you think?...sensing something out there, out beyond the painting. Defiant.”

I had to ask, Allan thought. Did she rehearse speeches like that?

Mary Weymark Goss (from the novel ‘Raven’)

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