Colin Self — Works on Paper 2021

The Dove of Peace and Dead Bird for Craigie (Aitchison):

“Springs Fireplace Road is the title of this suite of etchings printed by Maurice Payne on Long Island, USA. Maurice was the printer of my ‘Out of Focus Object and Flowers’ etchings at Editions Alecto in the late 60s/ early 70s. He printed my ‘Car’ etching there, and others. He has printed etchings for David Hockney, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns. A chance meeting in the 1990s at one of David Hockney’s private views reconnected us - he visited Norfolk and suggested working together again, leaving various etching plates here. His printing, his empathy and ability to get within the ‘psychology’ of what I am saying and how I want to say it, is truly amazing. In a phone call discussing work I asked what on earth Springs Fireplace Road is? He replied, “It’s where in the olden days there was a bonfire lit to guide in pirates like Bluebeard and Captain Kidd. Jackson Pollock’s studio is 50 yards down the road and the tree he crashed his car into is still there.’ So ’Springs Fireplace Road’ just had to be the title of this suite of work. I spend lots of time indoors working - unable to keep up with the stream of ideas. Akin to a diary in their small scale to random intimacy.”

Waterlilies, Brundall, Norfolk. Triptych. Fine Art Digital Print, permanent inks on archival acid free German etching paper. (images no12 edition of 30, printed 2019)

Inspired by a hidden pond where the mansion house had been deliberately burnt down, they are about the peace of nature where man had abandoned the site, and influenced by T.S. Elliot’s the Four Quartets. The original images are watercolours painted en plein air in the early 1980s.

In 1965 Colin Self had his first stellar one man show with Godfrey Pilkington at the Piccadilly Gallery, London and was also represented by London’s Robert Fraser Gallery, Duke Street from 1965 until his Cork Street Gallery closed 1985. An important and widely-exhibited figure in British art, Colin Self is known for being Pop Art’s political conscience. He attended Norwich School of Art in the late1950s followed by the Slade School of Art in the early 1960s. Colin uses diverse means and subject matters to produce a wide range of themes and ideas, and his works are held in many collections including 86 works in the Tate Gallery collection (currently displaying his large black Hotdog sculpture at Tate Modern) and Self’s Nuclear Victim is on permanent display in The Imperial War Museum. The late Richard Hamilton in a national press newspaper called Self ‘the best draughtsman in England since William Blake’ adding that when he went through a period of landscape watercolours it was ‘as if Cotman had come to life again.’