Praeterita

It's actually eleven years and one day since I published my first post on this blog: that doesn't sound as bookendish as "decade", which clearly I forgot to celebrate a year ago. This is the text of what I published on December 21st, 2009: Praeterita was the title of the great English writer John Ruskin's reflections on his life. In a sense we are always looking backwards at things that are now past as soon as we try to describe our experience. Ruskin's choice of the Latin word, with its archaic and somewhat grandiose feeling, was well-suited to his manner of thought and his writing. I have chosen to echo it not just from philosophical principle, but because my work involves reflections on personal narrative - mostly a childhood growing up in an English mining town in the 1960s and 1970s. Ruskin also said that he would write "frankly, garrulously, and at ease; speaking of what it gives me joy to remember at any length I like ... and passing in total silen...

June 16th was Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce's novel Ulysses , the action of which takes place on one day in Dublin in 1906. I've written before about the set of etchings I made back in the late 1990s, based on the Nighttown chapter of Ulysses. But after posting images of these etchings via social media during the most recent Bloomsday, I realised I could still say something about the various things that influenced my particular interpretation of Joyce's text. When I started planning the project in 1997, I was aware of a few other artists' visual responses to the book, such as Robert Motherwell's attractive and entirely abstract etchings, some hasty and uninspired lithographs by Matisse , and (the best ones, in my opinion) semi-abstract etchings by Mimmo Paladino: Mimmo Paladino, from Ulysses I started by narrowing down to one chapter: the Nighttown chapter, which takes place in the red light district of Dublin, and parallels the Circ...

That's John Schultz, founder of F magazine and the Story Workshop method, holding up the latest issue of F at the launch party. The picture on the cover is from my series of James Joyce etchings . F magazine is probably unique in the world of literary magazines in that it publishes long extracts from novels in progress. I am extremely proud to have my print on the cover, and equally proud to call John (and managing editor Tom Popp) a friend. Do look at their website or Facebook page , but more importantly, go out and buy a copy of the magazine.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I've been going back through folders, looking at older work, trying to discern the threads that connect it to my current work. I looked at the first set of etchings that I made in the late 1990s, about a year after I started learning the process: It's from a set of 10 etchings called Circe , based on the Night-town section of James Joyce's Ulysses . This print illustrates the moment when Leopold Bloom fantasises that he is being ridden around the room by the madame of a brothel. It parallels the moment in Homer's myth where Ulysses' men are transformed into pigs by the sorceress Circe. There are a number of influences that brought this print into being. The first was a suggestion from my etching teacher, a great German artist and printmaker called Thomas Gosebruch who lives in London. After taking classes with him for a while, he suggested I put what I had learned to use by working on a series based on my favourite book. Perhaps he had in mind a famous set of ...