This series of watercolours was done in art school (one of the few things not chucked out during my end-of-term pogroms) in 1979 or 80.
The white lettering is laboriously painted in gouache about an inch ortwo thick on the first picture, and then, equally laboriously, I put the poem in white Letraset (remember Letraset?) on sheets of acetate over each picture.
(The poem was done in English... well technically anyway, and must have seemed as obsure as the pictures. But then, most of my work followed the rule of the 3 "O"'s - obfuscated, oblique and obsessive.)
What a curious little gnome, with his tuberiferous nose and slouch hat. I wonder where he came from from, a sort of silvan troglodyte Gandalf on Dagobah...
The technique, I clearly remember, consisted of slopping huge quantites of watercolour on the illustration board and turning it every which way until it dried in amusing patterns (a Freudian field day, for sure) , and then working up the details more or less wherever the underlying splotches seemed to point...
At this point in art school, my reputation as a wierdo (but nonetheless relatively harmless and even occasionally endearing) was firmly established.
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