Tattoo Inspired Drawings

These 2 images are very low quality photos of some drawings I've made recently which will hopefully form the basis of some screenprints. They came about as I was thinking more about the idea of the Romantic Artist character that I have been putting in my paintings, and about the idea of a set of icons, mottos, motifs etc. that could be associated with these characters. The aim here was to create some tattoo designs for these artists. What sort of tattoos might they have? The second design is also based around the idea of a fictional artists' cycling club - with references to bicycle-related works by Picasso and Duchamp. This was also loosely inspired by Billy Childish's song 'Medway Wheelers' which was about a real club of that name. I suppose there's also a more general debt to Childish here as he created (or at least re-created) a sort of artist's uniform in the form of a yellow suit with an insignia.

The style of the drawings employs the linear style of Victorian illustration which seems to get used a lot in certain genres of tattooing (I'm not sure if this style was originally used in tattoos of that era, or whether it's a more recent nostalgic conflagration of the two things). I'm still thinking of how this could relate to the imagery and style of the paintings of trophies - whether the 2 things can meet or interrelate at any point.

I've been looking at trophies (esp. kitsch sports trophies) and am interested both in their mimicry of classical forms (the greek podium, triumphal arch, laurel wreaths, athletic statues etc.) and in the use of cheap materials (plastics, coated metals etc.) to suggest more expensive ones. These seem to be a good solution to my desire to use antique forms in a contemporary light without being too obviously altered. I also really like the mix of various symbols and motifs - eagles, shields, crowns etc.- used in a second-hand, diluted meaning kind of way. They are perfect examples of vague, generalised symbols, suggesting some kind of association with the past, grandeur, authority and their signifiers, but without direct reference or application.

I took these pictures of the trophy cabinet at my local Pool club in Peckham.

(Top) Robert Fowler The Birth of Venus (Middle) Anthony Canova The Three Graces (Bottom) Francois Boucher Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas

I'm looking for a Venus/Muse type figure to use as a statue in a small still life painting. I find the tackiness of Fowler's image somehow amusing - but would the result be too subtly ironic therefore complicit with the tackiness? Boucher's colours are great! I want to exploit those candy pinks and powder blues that seem to be a great visual shorthand for that kind of saccharin C18th Romanticism and chocolate-boxey painting in general. Perhaps my aspirations for painting are developing a softer edge? It may be that Poussin had unwittingly prepared the ground for that - both in my interest and in general.

There's a thin line between high and low here - it could all easily slip over in some sort of awful Boris Vallejo rock album cover world like this:

Totemic Arcadians

Nicolas Poussin: A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term 1632-3 (detail)

Poussin's Arcadian paintings seem good examples of the sort of stone memorials I've been thinking about - the stone being a visual shorthand for the 17th Century cult of nostalgic classicism cf. The Arcadian Shepherds etc.

This term of Bacchus looks on, begarlanded, and challenges us to disapprove of the revels taking place before him. I am fascinated by such stone faces - challenging, authoritative, sphinx-like, inscrutable - totemic even. They bear a fellowship with the more prosaic example of lion's head door knocker such as I have painted previously:

Thomas Helyar-Cardwell Portent 24x24" oil on canvas 2009

The totem is a guardian, a prophet even. A symbol holder who also embodies the symbol it contains. These devices lurk throughout the history of genre and still life painting, picked up on later after the mania for African masks arrived at the turn of the C20th...

They suggest rites, festivals, celebration, mourning, philosophising, renewal, foreboding etc. See particularly the masks on the floor of Poussin's scene here:

Nicolas Poussin The Triumph of Pan 1636

The clay vessels and garlands littering the floor are like a scattered still life - the tranquility of which is being trampled by the orgiastic revellers in their outrageous debauch of painting's contemporary narrative.