I quite often think about this painting, Holman Hunt's vivid and unusual depiction of " The Scapegoat ".

I had a memory of returning to it again and again in The Walker Gallery, Liverpool, which I only discovered recently can't have been right since it was bought from the Walker in 1923 by The Lever gallery.

My own personal fascination with it was due to the vivid colours in such a barren landscape setting which, despite the water present, put me in mind of the moon. After further investigation, it might appear that the picture I was more likely to be staring at so frequently was another version to be found in the Manchester Art Gallery, described as being more vivid than the one I thought I saw in the Walker, but it's also described as small with a rainbow in it, which I don't remember. My abiding memory will be of standing before a large painting of a goat in a barren landscape painted in what to me seemed like psychedelic colours, as if I've mixed the two paintings up somehow without ever having been to the Lever Gallery until fairly recently.

Apparently Ruskin thought it was a terrible painting, commenting that   "Mr Hunt has been blinded by his intense sentiment to the real weakness of the pictorial expression; and in his earnest desire to paint a scapegoat, he has forgotten to ask himself first, whether he could paint a goat at all."  Witty, but rather harsh, since Hunt had surely done a good job considering he had painted in the actual landscape apparently with a gun across his knee incase of bandits. 

Wikipedia cites an amusing anecdote of how Holman Hunt's Belgian picture dealer Gambart didn't want to buy it because he thought it was certain to not be understood by anyone and he would be stuck with it. Set out as a conversation, it describes a conversation between Gambart and Hunt in which Gambart proves to Holman Hunt that it would not be understood, even by English people by inviting his English wife and friend into the studio to view it. Sure enough they didn't mention the story from Leviticus and merely made complimentary comments about the colours. I suppose this might be insinuating that people don't read the Bible, or at least the book of the Bible that this story comes from and that it probably wasn't ever referred to in sermons in churches, either in France or England. 

I wonder why Hunt was so surprised at this ? He himself had only come across the story whilst researching for his painting " The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple " and it seems it must have rocked him to the core since it inspired him to go to Israel and paint the picture in situ. 

As to the colours, Wikipedia also tells us that someone else who was impressed by the "sci-fi book cover " intensity of it was the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton who wrote after visiting Israel  " now on the shores of the Dead Sea I knew that I saw exactly the background I had remembered.....if anything more exceptional, more other-worldly, than the painting had made them. " 

William Holman Hunt was painting what he saw. 

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More adventures with Cyanotypes

I did a fun thing with some of the cyanotypes I made; inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, cut lozenges out and created my own small pack from them, then overlaid the original print onto another one, which made a collage. 

Some of the cards have written ideas on, others are blank.

I am considering a story.

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Adventures With Cyanotypes

 

Like many other people, I have so enjoyed the cyanotype process. I haven't developed much skill in it yet, but I quite like some of the results so far;

I like the unpredictability of the process, the fact that there are forces and influences outside of myself producing the final effect which I cannot completely control and nor do I want to. 

Growing Square

 

This may not look much to you, it's fairly small, life-size, though not miniature enough to be astounding; the image within the frame being almost nearly, though not quite, square, at 19cm high and 18cm wide.

It's a cyanotype collage and here's how I made it;

I picked the Lavender, Rosemary, Oregano and Viola from my garden and pressed them between some absorbent paper under some heavy books for a week or so. The Oak leaf I had found under a pile of other Oak leaves at the end of the winter in 2020.

I mixed the cyanotype chemicals and prepared some papers in semi darkness. I have a safe red light and some of the lights in our kitchen are LEDs which apparently don't ruin the process, unlike halogen light emitted by incandescent bulbs, so, in this dim light, I painted the papers and allowed them to dry, giving them another coat then storing them in light safe bags when they were thoroughly dry.

This takes a couple of hours and any curious cats must be kept out of the way during the process; especially hard with black ones who tend to slip in unnoticed, particularly if the light is dim.

I've had a certain amount of success in the past with cyanotypes by leaving them in the sun outside or on a window ledge inside. It's a little unpredictable in the Pennines because the sky is usually cloudy and those clouds generally like to offload their rain on us around here as they pass, but that's an element of chance I really enjoy. 

However, if I tell you that our secret name for where we live is Windy Ridge and that it goes nice and dark around here at about 4 to 4.30 in the depths of Winter, plus the fact that I was given a wonderful UV lamp especially for this process, you might be able to guess why, on this occasion, I decided to use that rather than natural light. 

I really love the cyanotype process. It encompasses all the elements of the creative process which appeal to me; an element of craft and skill, with a large input of chance. Like all photography, the whole process cannot be controlled entirely and this always provides me with a frisson of excitement and a feeling that magic is involved. 

I replaced the original herbs and flowers nearby their cyanotype ' shadows ' and privately titled it ' you dancin' '.

∞

Confession

 

Over three decades ago, I went to a communal art therapy session in which we were asked to draw or paint our mind as a house. 

All the other participants set to with great enthusiasm, their images of self perception flowed easily, but me, I sat staring blankly at the sheet of paper on the easel, sadly wondering why I could not see inside of me. All I could think of was the tentative little spider pencil drawings drawn by Marianne in a book I had loved as a child called Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. It's one of those stories in which the child is poorly in bed, Marianne grows very attached to a stubby pencil with which she draws a house and this immediately features in her dreams. The story goes that she begins to manipulate the recurring dreams she has of the drawings she makes by adding extra features, a garden, landscape and eventually people. 

I eventually painted a small house upon a distant hill and, rather reluctantly as I remember, added a long windy path up to it. 

It was colourful enough, looked homely and inviting, somewhere one might imagine enjoying visiting or living in, certainly not haunted looking or forbidding. One could imagine it having comfortable, warm,  rooms, maybe just the odd broom cupboard or pokey corner where a couple of hostile spiders resided would be the only scary parts within it. 

I have often blocked access to my inner self with a reluctance to ' make stuff up ' not so much regarding the products of my imagination to be nonsense or non-truth, but rather, convoluted distractions which would lead me away from that house on the hill, rather than to its door. 

So where have I been looking ?

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Portrait : A Mirror

                                them,
It's not the concrete you,
                                me,

          their
More your disparate parts,
          my

Their            
Your mouth and its assumptions,
My                     my

Their
Your nose and the way it lies,
My

( the years take their toll on our peripheries),

                           their
The triangles of your shoulder girdle and our
                          my

suprasternal notch,

Points of vulnerabilities,

Their
Your
Our internal structures emerging through our skin

which stretches over them to

form a padded suit to hold us all together,

Delicate in its own receptiveness,

Telling the tale of our times

on its transmutable surface.



    my
Is the  ear lobe visible,
    your

Is it pierced and decorated with a stud,

Or ring or some dangling

                                         t
h
i
n
g


Your                                      our
My listening gathered in by the auricle,
Their                                     their

Which can be imagined twitching imperceptibly,

Responding hair-like to the undulations of the waves,

As they sweep by en-route to anywhere and everywhere.


                my
Where is your hair ?

         
Is it tucked behind the pinna,

                                 your
Bound tight behind my head

with something pulling,

To expose our temples,

and their worrisome veins ?

      you
Do I want to see it waving,
      we

Florid, tumbling downward,

                            our
Undulating over my naked shoulders ?
                           your

An eye is guided by the beholder.

There is;


Sensuality in the direction of the gaze,

The way the light,

The line of form,

The suggestion of texture.


Look at the surfaces,


       your
Let our looking wander,
      my

Until,


The eyes are met at last.


And lock.


Then we think

about hands.

Art as

Things we choose to examine     Things that come unbidden
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                        |                         |                     |
              Art as Science             |         Art as alchemy
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                                             Words

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