At 2.15 pm on Tueday 28th April 2020, he read then turned the page. Two years later he looked back at the words he had underlined “the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than … ever … before”[1] – he mulled this over for a few weeks before adding the initial pencil mark to the support’s surface, a first tentative step of building that would continue for approximately 30 hours – pencil, eraser and stencil – he then placed it on the studio wall.
A full year later he took it down, sanded part of it away, re-drew, added more, then returned it to its place on the wall – it is still there, waiting, marking time…
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Just over 80 years ago my father bought 3 postcards of Rome when stationed in Italy towards the end of the war. One I cut into and used in a 12-centimetre square collage around 25 years ago; it took a couple of hours to arrange, rearrange, then fix in position. When taking scalpel and glue to that postcard I was 10 years older than my father was when he bought it, and 3 years had passed since his death.
How long did the collage take to make? Can it be dated or timed? Perhaps only meaningfully as connecting the years that were not shared of two overlapping lifetimes.
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McNeill, when challenged in court by John, spoke of the lifetime of experience embodied in “two days labour”. Or something like that, so the story goes.
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I am currently holding a conversation with Rembrandt – via the pages of a 5”x 7”, 1920’s pocketbook monograph found amongst my late mother’s belongings. Its reproductions in velvety monochrome on thin, friable paper are nothing like Rembrandt’s paintings, yet they capture something compelling – both of what we carry with us after a visit to the Rijksmuseum and of the time in which the pocketbook was printed. They tell me something too about my mother.
Today I spend time drawing, painting and collaging directly into and onto the page that illustrates Rembrandt’s 1657 portrait of his son Titus held in the Wallace Collection. Titus died a year later, a year before his father and three hundred and ten years before I was born. Numbers, labour, lifetimes, connections, material; time spent, drawing by drawing, painting by painting.
Cradle
Wellspring
Chris Jones
4th August 2023