While the Rooum find was a lot of fun the best piece of work in Wakefield’s gallery, in my opinion anyway, is the print of Elizabeth Frink’s Head II. It looks a little like this:
Except it doesn’t. For a start I don’t remember that blue wash behind it being quite so insipid and the blacks are really black, but reducing it down from something like a metre high to a wee jpeg is never going to do it justice.
The gallery had put it together with a couple of other portraits which was a bad idea for the other paintings as Frink’s piece towered above them. Essentially a charcoal (?) sketch, possibly for a sculpture, she builds the sense of mass with simple swirls and a cartoonists eye for subtle caricature (which is probably why I was drawn to it). I could have stared at it for hours.
Frink’s marvellous. I went to her place on a duck delivery back in the 80s, and at the entrance there were two huge piles of concrete blocks on either side of the drive, topped by two huge rough bronze heads – about as tall as I was. A really weird Dorset moment. Thanks for the links to Welding’s exhibition, too — an interesting project
sooooooo. . .did you do this or is this frinks?
It’s Frink’s.