Thursday, 6 December 2012

Scratchboard fun and The Nightmare Paintings


Holocaust in Utopia
Created as a Scratchboard etching

I love this medium, Scratchboard/Clayboard/Scraperboard. It can be effective in works of strong light and shadow contrast obviously and with some skill one could doe work to the level of Dore and his engravers. This was my first attempt at it, but i will be coming back to this more and more. Currently I am working on a image based on Emily Bronte's tragic and tormented story Wuthering Heights. This is the right medium for such a work, though one must prepare thoroughly as mistakes are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse in scratchboard.

On another more marvellous note, I have been invited to have works showing in an exhibition of Aleister Crowley's Nightmare Paintings. Myself, and several other artists, including Barry Hale, Nathan Hopkins and Corinne MacIain have created works based on some of the designs from the Nightmare and Heaven rooms from the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu. The Abbey no longer exists as anything more than ruins, but Crowley had produced a beautiful and quite visionary tourist guide giving descriptions and deeper insights into the wall paintings there.
The exhibition is at Buratti Fine Art in North Fremantle, Western Australia and is running until late February 2013 if i recall correctly.

Love is the law, love under will.

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