Back Story

This face is a stand-in, an emblem, a token of many an unlikely, unsung hero, an unknown soldier.  They’re in many of our family histories.

It formed itself on a sheet of paper on my drawing table one day early in the 1980s.  Unbidden, unplanned, and certainly the most unexpected result of approaching a blank sheet with intent to draw from a blank mind—when unable to inspire an image by any other means I frequently do my own version of ‘automatic’ writing and drawing; in this instance ending up with the kind of presence a Ouija Board supposedly can summons.

My right hand made motions across, and up and down the page with soft charcoal, discovering a head and shoulders, innovating it, defining it on the fly but allowing it to be what it wanted to be, and stopping while it was yet arresting and spectral.  I drag-wiped some areas with a tissue to unify them and add atmosphere, or the suggested swirl of an arriving figure, et, le voilà, I emerged at an unexpected place, a startling meditation on the numbness, the horrific milieu of trench warfare.

Perhaps it manifested itself out of my childhood school-days from the many iterations of NL’s tragic day at Beaumont Hamel, France, July 1, 1916.  I didn’t need to add, nor attempt to remove, any of the original markings—it was already by impulse both perfect & imperfect, complete & incomplete, and likewise, also exhausting & enervating: a figure with masked emotions, an icon or a logo of extreme ennui, a doomed figure, a corpse-in-waiting.

The original, being charcoal, was black and grey-toned.  About twenty-five years later, having decided it had enough impact to survive as a drawing, and when filing it on computer, I flipped it over into sepia and decided I preferred it so: having a little colour (life? hope? heart-beat?) somehow stayed the monochrome youth this side of the river Styx.