The Bonniest Companie

 ‘I watched nineteen deer

Pour from ridge to glen floor

 Where they stopped,

 And turned to stare

 the foremost with a queenly air

as though to say ‘Aren’t we

 The bonniest companie?…’

 Artwork for ‘The Bonniest Companie’, a new collection of poems by Kathleen Jamie. The exerpt is from ‘The Hinds‘ one of the fifty or so poems that feature in the book.

As a lay person, I have always been in awe of how a poet creates a whole world with words, and that’s just in one poem. So when Kathleen Jamie and Picador commissioned an artwork to go on the cover of a whole collection of poems I was rather doubtful as to how I could possibly achieve this. Perhaps this is what led to the creation of the most complex print I have done to date. Two drypoint plates and approximately fifty layers of chine colle…I think! And every moment was a pleasure. So thank you to Kathleen and Picador for a new challenge, and also a big thank you to Roger Cuthbert for the photography and in-house digital services.

The book will be out in hardback, in November, published by Picador.

http://www.picador.com/books/the-bonniest-companie

http://www.kathleenjamie.com/the-bonniest-companie/

It is available for pre-order on Amazon but much better to place an order at one’s local bookshop instead, if you still have one!

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Printing Plates of Horses

 The copperplate after etching. This is Danny, drawn onto hard ground, etched, cleaned and now inked up and ready to go.

 And here he is after printing. Detail.

Danny is typical of the 140,000 odd horses that were recruited by the army in a matter of weeks after the outbreak of the First World War, leaving farms with perhaps one in four horses, in a time when horses were still the driving force behind, or rather in front of, everything. None of the horses would ever return to the farms they were taken from.

No Mans Land

Last year, I contributed to an exhibition of illustrated envelopes at The Illustration Cupboard in London, for which I used the etching plate of a gun team I had made for a War Horse bookplate. I was recently commissioned by an individual in Edinburgh to make an envelope work like one of the earlier ones he had seen, entitled ‘No Mans Land’, so I asked if he would like a particular address to be included in the work. This is the result which I have been given permission to publish. The address is that of his grandmother to whom War Office correspondence was sent regarding the loss of her husband who fought in the trenches and died from delayed effects of gas poisoning during the train journey home from London to Edinburgh at the end of the war.

 The Gun Team, etching, available in an edition of 25, shown here framed by Vincent. This will be included in the forthcoming exhibition ‘With New-Won Eyes’ which opens in Wiltshire in November.

Vasalisa

 Vasalisa (Chapter I) – etching with chine colle 107 x 78cm, one of the new works which will be included in the new exhibition opening at The Stone Wall Gallery next week.

  Vasalisa & Monsieur Rochat