An eclectic selection of  thematic artworks where image and concept meet. More descriptive than the colour studies, these works encompass a wide range of styles and periods in my artistic development over the past 30 years.

Some works are purely conceptual, some are figurative or illustrate texts, such as in Rilke poem illustration, and some are derivative, such as the Circle of O. The Circle of O is the last of 12 motifs on the ceiling of the Great Hall in both the 1st and 2nd Goetheanum.

All lean towards the imaginative rather than the representational, but are generally less process-oriented than the colour studies and murals, due to their figurative nature.

The text of the illustrated Rilke poem, translated by me from the German, is below.

 

 

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Slowly the sky puts on its darkening blue coat,
held for it by a rim of ancient trees. 
You watch, and two worlds grow distant in your sight, 
One rising heavenwards, one that falls … 

Leaving you, not really belonging to either. 
It’s not so completely dark, as the house that is silent. 
Yet not so unbearably given to the eternal, 
as that which becomes a star each night, and rises;

Leaving you (it’s impossible to unravel all the threads) 
your life: with all it’s immensity and it’s fear
so that, now bounded, now reaching out …
Sometimes your life is stone in you, and sometimes star.

Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Fiona Campbell)