Studies For Don Van Vliet And The Golden Bough

Study For Don van Vliet And The Golden Bough

pencil, acrylic, gloss paint, collage, photocopy on paper

50x40cm

The Constellation of The Lyre

Here are some notes on the recent works; they are still under consideration.

The Constellation of the Lyre has six images based on painting and one with collage, there are also a number of associated drawings.  The individual works use different styles or visual languages to present aerial views, views looking up and presentations of things that fly and leave the earth, however briefly.  The  Pinakothek Der Moderne shows an image from the collection catalogue cover that features Joseph Beuys’s The End of the Twentieth Century.  The title has a certain ring from the use of English and German words together.  The second painting, The Ecstasy of the Great Wood Carver Steiner  re-orders a title from a Werner Herzog film about the champion ski jumper and carpenter Walter Steiner. 

Two paintings have the same title: We Are Stardust.  This title comes from a song written by Joni Mitchell, with associations to Woodstock and its sentiment urging a reconnection to nature.   One image is a single tree, the other a more abstract reading, has its source in a communications tower at a motorway service station.  The Second Badge Painting builds its own constellation and emblem. 

Edward Thomas wrote the poem The Constellation of the Lyre, his original sketch and notation reproduced in Edward Thomas Selected Poems, edited by Matthew Hollis, (Faber and Faber Ltd 2011).

Flight 447 crashed in the Southern Atlantic in 2009, there were no survivors from the Air France disaster.  Although various pieces of wreckage were found floating on the sea’s surface, the hunt for and eventual discovery of the black boxes was extraordinarily long and difficult.  The work, Constellation of the Lyre, uses a collage element from part of a poster for an exhibition of Indian Shiva Linga divine mystique paintings.

This is the constellation of the Lyre: 

Its music cannot ever tire,

For it is silent.  No man need fear it:

Unless he wants to, he will not hear it.