Stanley Spencer Arrives in Heaven

I still had Cookham, Spencer and the World War One artists in my mind when I was thinking about an image for my collatype print series. It occurred to me that I could take Spencer's painting 'John Donne Arrives in Heaven' and do a version of it with Spencer arriving in heaven to be greeted by angels. The iconic image of Spencer pushing his push chair through Cookham seemed appropriate. I decided to create the angels by drawing them into filler and printing them in intaglio but in a vague dream like way. By accident some of my test prints using carborundum on plywood had created some interesting contrasts between the texture of the plywood and the the texture of the carborundum and I could sort of imagine the exposed plywood being a slightly comic little man. I experimented with these combinations and evolved a stencil shape to represent Spencer. I printed the angels first on soaked Somerset paper in a landscape format and did about five. I chose a gold brown colour using burned Sienna and some yellow Occaldo oil based inks. I wiped the ridges of the block and pushed the paper down into the troughs with my fingers on the back of the paper. I was quite pleased with the effect and let them dry.

I cut out my stencil from cartridge paper and placed it on my ply wood and then covered the whole with PVA, sprinkled carborundum on it and removed the stencil. When it was dry I covered it with blue ink diluted with oil using an old hog hair brush. I added more colour to make the ink slightly violet as the series progressed. Finally I back drew the wheels of the pushchair with a blunt pencil and on one even experimented with back drawing around the stencil image, this was a complete failure but has an attraction and I will use it as a technique at some point in the future.

I didn't like the finished image. The comic image of Spencer didn't say 'Spencer' and it didn't work in landscape. Also I began to think the whole idea wouldn't work because it was all too vague.

I had a rethink and decided to use a tracing of Spencer pushing his pushchair that I had on a postcard I bought whilst in Cookham. I cut a small paper easel which would appear white on the finished print. I made a block out of cardboard and placed the stencil of Spencer on it then covered the whole with PVA and sprinkled carborundum all over it then removed the stencil. When it was dry I inked up the block using oil based ink diluted with vegetable oil as I had run out of Linseed oil and then placed the easel stencil onto the inked block. I had run out of Somerset paper and so I used tinted Ingres pastel paper soaked with a water spray and left between bits of blotting paper weighted down for about five minutes. I used the same colours as before and the same method and block for the angels but this time done portrait.

This image worked better and I achieved a measure of success I believe, there is a ghostly feeling to the image of Spencer and where the vagueness of the angels is matched with the vagueness of Spencer the prints achieve a certain cohesiveness. The warm angels on buff tinted paper contrast the cold blue/violet image of spencer.