Sky Atlas

This woodcut is laser cut with hand painting. The moon is an orange soaked orb at the base of the picture. There is a radar grid covering the print, almost like the cross hairs of a telescopic sight. I was remembering asdic and ships radar from childhood movies on Sunday afternoons. Here I hope it hints that someone else is watching from afar, the tiny craft caught in a web, like Odysseus being the pawn of the gods trying to get back to Ithaca. An inevitable preordained journey. The woodcut has a tiny capsule, on the outside, like the command module of the Apollo landings, on the inside a more contemporary spaceship; lit up like Christmas lights, a sort of home from home in his little tin can. This section of each print was painstakingly hand-painted, with very different atmospheres and details, all inspired by photographs of the Shuttle cockpit. Blue Earth is beginning to recede - a transposition of a Chinese scroll drawing of a house amongst rocks and trees: a sort of detailed linear Willow Pattern plate and a prelapsarian Eden. Why on earth leave?! The shapes of the wood grain, just as I remember the ghostly shapes behind the credits of Doctor Who when very small, with that haunting reverb music made in the BBC Radiophonic workshop, helped me plan out the shapes of the multicoloured flume, like stacked batman chevrons/logos. The various hollow rocket stages, empty vessels - empty of fuel, are twisting away and receding back into the darkness of space - TH