Christmas !

           Christ, Via Dolorosa , lithograph (1960s)

 

This is a print from a limited edition of lithographs made by my teacher and mentor, Léo Marchutz back in the 1960's. I've always loved it and it has been lodged somewhere in the base of my brain as a model of what could be possible in the wonderful world of drawing.

It fits into a difficult category of work because it is too 'abstract', perhaps even messy, for some viewers of art, yet for others, it is decidedly too realist. That it is a 'religious' figure like Christ makes it even more problematic. But hey!

The 1960's in France was the beginning of a period of POP art after a brief chapter of Surrealism that reigned supreme after the war.

Léo worked alone and separate from any 'ism'. Self-taught, he developed a unique way of transferring drawings made on paper onto the limestone and ready to be inked up and printed. 

Once transferred 'into' the soft stone he was able to pull as many prints as he wished. He made hundreds of prints in this manner over two decades. Using specially made rollers, often very thin, he laboriously rolled out each part of the drawing with different colours so that he could make just one run through the press and avoid crushing the paper with numerous passes. To arrive at the right colours  he actually mixed oil paints to get exactly what he wanted. This seemed to work out well as industrialised colours were limited.

I wasn't around in those days because I had not yet arrived in Aix for University until 1972. He lent me one of his wooden litho presses and a few dozen stones and taught me lithography. I had a studio on the west side of Aix for about two years until I lost interest in it and fell in love with Painting. 

But it's the drawing of Christ that interests me the most for it's extraordinary. The expression  is spontaneous yet so well realised. Funny enough, I would have certainly loved to see many of his drawings he threw out in order to get to get to this one of Christ. 

He drew incessantly during the 1940's, and 1950's. I'm not sure about the 1960's because he was printing all the drawings. I only knew him the last four years of his life, and by then he was still working on his large paintings made from drawings in the studio.

Anyway, this drawing for me was a watershed moment because it opened up a whole world of possibilities for me. It switched me onto the chaotic world working quickly out in a crowd which led me to drawing trips to Vietnam and Morocco and in cafes everywhere. 

Though infinitely inferior to Léo's Christ, I took from him (and later Albert Marquet) an idea of working outdoors. This drawing doesn't even really work at all but I loved the feeling it at that time almost twenty years ago..

Time flies as we all know, so make a great Christmas for yourselves and don't forget two things: Get a great hobby in life, and give away not only whatever wisdom you've acquired but also, and most especially, all your love to others.