Saturday 1 February 2014

Malta Sketchbook #1: Tigne Battery 14 Sept
















Tigne Battery 14 Sept 1995 
(Charcoal, coloured Conte and 2B pencil, over two pages of A4 sketchbook)

A couple of days after arriving in Malta, I came across Tigne Battery. Barely discernible through graffiti (including a swastika), a commemorative stone read:

TIGNE BATTERY
RECONSTRUCTED 1937

Looking about, it was clear the Battery had been badly deconstructed after that, during the Seige of Malta in the Second World War, but to me it was immediately fascinating. Broken and stained concrete, rusting metal; what's not to like?

I hurried back to the hotel, collected my drawing bag and discarding the smaller sketchbook, got to work in an A4 sketchbook. This is the first drawing I did, showing the entrance to a gun emplacement, the gun having long been removed, of course. There's a long tradition of pictures looking through from one room to another and this a variant, I suppose. I like the feeling that something or someone may be waiting in that darkened interior.


2 comments:

Casey Klahn said...

Highly abstracted and pleasing. You let the paper say the concrete, but the stuff you drew in is just as compelling. Bravo!

harry bell said...

Thanks Casey. The drawing was, as usual, fairly intuitive, but I guess much of it comes from practice.