282 - A Book about Death

I have entered a postcard in the exhibition called A Book About Death. This is the first in some while, so it feels exciting, new and wonderful. It is giving me a bit more confidence to find time to sit down and do some real artwork for exhibitions. I have another local exhibition to aim for and now trying to build some momentum to do this piece of work.


The image is from a series I did from some photos I took of Highgate Cemetery in North London, the one opposite where Karl Marx's is buried. I visited in cemetery in 1990/1, when restoration was underway. I found out about the cemetery from this book, Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla (I have used the USA site as there is no image on the UK site) and living in Western London, I decided to go.

It was a fantastic place as the vegetation had started to dominate the area and had nearly hidden all the graves, statues and buildings that were built for graves. The cemetery had been used in Hammer Horror films in the 1960's and there are legends of Vampires haunting the place (surely an urban myth?). As a visitor, you were taken round in groups and shown some of the more famous graves, e.g. Lizzie Siddal, wife of Gabriel Dante Rossetti - and it was here that he dug the grave to 'resurrect' his poems that were put in the coffin with her.

The pictures come from the photos I took when I visited and on a subsequent visit a year later. A lot of the trees had wide foliage and looked like people starting proud in the sharp blue sky, but then you had the debris of death creeping through. Or the other way of life resurrecting itself out of these cold, harsh yet beautiful monuments. This image is one that looks like a figures and I highlighted the branches to look like a skeleton build into the greenery.

One of the other things in creating this postcard was to use some of the Adobe CS skills that I had learnt to create a printable image. I have already done this with my business cards. So I wanted to have a Victorian funeral card with black edging that I had recently found about and the image centred almost like a loved one. The rest was to be the opposite with a white border with a black centre and white out type.

The post card uses the idea of framing that I have used in other pieces. I used the address part of the post card to give the title of the exhibition and the final strap line is based on Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright as the centre of his parallel world used the notation, 000.000.000 to indicate its position. A final destination.

The stamp I took from a packet that I intended to use on some other ideas, I was thinking about. Something, I saw at the Victorian & Albert - China Design show last year. Where a poster had a large object and then a stamp had been added to indicate where the show was. I over-extravagated the colour of the flower to counter the impending gloom on the reverse with brightness, harking back to the front of the postcard and therefore, a return to life.