"What thou has asked is granted"
28 x 57 cm. Rapidograph inks on Schoelleshammer G4 illustration paper.
Mephistopheles stands before God and the host of heaven and wagers that he can corrupt the heart of any man, no matter how wise or intelligent. God accepts the wager telling Mephistopheles that no one knows his garden better than the gardener.
The Tragedy of Faust is an old story whose origin's are unknown. The earliest known version is German, but appears to reference another (now lost in the depths of time) earlier account in latin. Another possible source of the Faust story is a wholly different tale, written by a Dutch woman Anna Bijns, in the late fourteenth century which involves a young woman called Maria who sells her soul to a one eyed demon called Moenen so that she may learn the several liberal arts. After a life of misery, she repents and is saved.
The most commonly known versions describe Faust as a German doctor who lived from 1480 to 1540, but I changed the story and set it in 1710 because I didn't like the clothes they wore in the 1500's. Apart from this deviation, I kept largely to the books by Goethe.
This image was pretty straight forward, it differs from all the others in that the lines in the background were drawn with a ruler. The idea was that by this manner I might show the purity of the divine as opposed to the corruptable nature of mortality. This style of drawing is very simple, but time consuming. As far as I am aware, it was developed by the American artist Bernie Wrightson who used it to great effect in his masterpiece, 'Frankenstein'. To say that I was copying Wrightson is an understatment. I used his work as a direct template for my own, learning more practical knowledge from his images than from my own worthless tutors. At the time I did not even own a copy of Wrightson's book, I only had a few images from it in another book and two phtotocopies I'd taken from a friends book, so in total I had 11 images to examine and use to figure out how to create the textures and illusions needed to bring the images alive.
Previous to this project, I had undertaken a course in printmaking, specialising in etching. Illustrating several poems by Paul Celan, I had focused on simple figurative poses, trying to use the linear human body form as an expression of the stark nature of the poetry, but I felt I'd failed when that project ended. This led me to carry on by myself, working on a large single image based on the Magnificat and taking as a starting point, the austere 'Magnifcat' by Krzystof Penderecki, which I had recently then acquired on cd. This etching was my final piece in the print making workshop at KIAD and the direct descendent of the above image of Mephistopheles mocking God by adopting the same pose as Jesus on the cross. One small detail of this image is in the eyes which are negative to symbolize the dark nature of Mephistopheles.
No comments:
Post a Comment