The first image is the first six tiles I smoke fired. A one in a million firing to work so well for an unplanned image. The second image is of my faithful model Cleo. I used a subtractive charcoal process with white conte. Very dirty work. The last image was found on http://www.archaeology.org. I was watching "How art made the world" (bbc) and it got me thinking about our relationship with death and the role of art in that relationship. The artists would clean the skull and cover it with plaster to represent the dead. They would put shells in where the eyes were and keep it in their living space.
So this is a start to something. I thought I would throw this image from the BBC doc "the Secret of Drawing" part 3. the image was painted by Cynthia Weldon (née Pell), while in a mental hospital a few days before she killed herself by cutting her own throat in the bathtub. It was painted in the 1970's.
