Beasts

In 2014 I visited Crete and the archaeological site of the Minoan culture at Knossos. I had a juvenile interest in the imagery of bull jumping that I had seen illustrated in encyclopedias and art history books in my teens. Kilted women facing a charging bull and appearing to leap, perhaps even somersaulting over the beast. Images of heightened courage, together with grace and an apparent absence of cruelty. Poised in their symmetrical design, aspects of this imagery seemed somehow appropriate to contemporary culture.

The images lodged in my mind.

In the intervening several years most of my drawing has addressed men with a degree of pathos and even contrition. A need for a manifestly regenerative energy brought me back to this imagery.

I began a triptych drawing of a bull. Such a beast is already its own exaggeration. Keeping it tame, and with calm descriptive neutrality was - and is - the challenge.

My studio is no Noahs ark, but raiding my storage archive I found that in the decade of the eighties I had often addressed myself to men and beasts, frequently in two by two within the double panelled format of the diptych. The unfinished 'Tyger/Tyger' diptych, inspired by the William Blake poem of 1794. Nocturnal and solitary, this drawing never saw the light of day, confined as it was within its storage cylinder for 32 years.

The 'Terribilita' horse drawing from 1990 had been out to pasture once or twice and the debased and discomforting crawling man from 1980, came into the light after several decades hidden from view.

I have drawn the bull, a creature without politics, and I have drawn a 'Europa' facing the bull with poise and indeterminate purpose.

There is a brutal aspect to some of this work, but the intention was and is never gratuitous. I think I regard artists to be like sappers under the wire, mine sweepers advancing with their imagination into places where experience hopes never to tread.

Godwin Bradbeer September 2019