After the rain

And - after I had finished blogging last night there was suddenly some almighty claps of thunder, and lightning - which I usually enjoy and thought might clear the air - but then torrential rain which, not unusually, suddenly poured down our small sloping backyard from the Downs above and streamed under the backdoor - flooding the kitchen/studio...
so a miserable hour or so at midnight spent swabbing and mopping to clear up.....fortunately the rest of the night was dry

so - back to woodcutting this morning ( with a rather sore arm from the swabbing) and another couple of lugubrious images....

The background town-scape was inspired originally by the Shanghai skyline: it may be the first of the series. A masked father and child are passing, turning to look at the miserable Fool - or is he just the ghost of a shopping trolley, he seems to have grown into it...if it seems necessary I will include some pale legs on a second block - all these just first steps.... and they are of course the wrong way round so as to be correct when printed... altho at this stage I start questioning myself and making different narrative possibilities for if they are facing the other way....

Are these figures queuing for the sale or the Styx....this may be number 3, after the image shown a couple of days ago.....

it was originally from a scribble drawing I made inspired by some Extinction Rebellion protesters doing something interesting in their red gowns, but now it has quite unconsciously become more like something from the Catacombs in Palermo...  which I visited 2-3 years ago - an extraordinary and poignant place. 

A good walk out of the centre of town it is now a popular tourist destination but should be treated with respect as the monks who look after it request, and artistically in a careful way too. I saw an advert for a new book of photos recently and the glossy paper and dark blacks seemed completely wrong for a place of literally shades, of greys and faded fabrics, gossamer webs, transience, liminal space...a place not without all the humour and foibles of humanity yes, but where so difficult to render the ambivalence of emotion and atmosphere....

An interesting word that 'render' - as artists we do often plunge in like vultures, rapacious, greedy, as the living are... but we must still take care, I question my own gothic tendances all the time and worry about my Fool book...

I hope the wood will sort things out as I cut - woodcut has its own history, clunky but based in past folktales, gruesome images and caricatures, broadsheets and politics....

Our Palermo landlady - a medic as it happened - told us her story of being accidentally shut in the catacombs overnight in her youth with a young medical man; when the monk let them out in the morning he berated them for getting 'deliberately' lost and in his eyes up to no good...

ah ..sex and death, duende - the story as told by her was very Sicilian in a nicely ambivalent way....