This is a self-portrait in an old, de-silvered mirror in the Higgins gallery. When mirrors get damp, they can turn an unreflective smoky black. The only way to repair them, I believe, is to have them re-silvered. I'd been looking at engravings by Edward Bawden. He was a friend of the artist Ravilious. Their figures have a similar, faintly comic demeanour - whether mowing grass, ploughing fields, defusing mines or lounging in the shade. And both artists/illustrators studied at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s and became 'war artists' in WW2. Ravilious, at the age of 39, went missing in action. Bawden was deeply affected by his friend's death. There's humanity as well as humour in how Edward Bawden portrays hospital nurses, soldiers and bibliophiles. I tried to borrow that sense of the absurd. |