Towards Dusk, Munkerup

This woodcut took nearly two years to make between spells of a lot of self doubt. When you have two figures in an image there is always a push and pull between them. She’s too strong, he’s too weak and so on. I needed to get the figures balanced because I knew that if I could do this I would be able to project them as being calm, both in their relationship to each other and the world around them. Their environment in its beauty, richness and effervescence is full throttle, blowy drama. Perhaps if I can be calm and focus on that, then this is my best way of coping with each global existential crisis, as they hit the newsfeeds on a daily basis. But what is so peculiar now, just noticing in real time how our climate crisis is so ahead of how we all, animals and plants included, adapt for survival. Like being in a time machine, I keep feeling that I am witnessing the demise of our existence and in this woodcut these figures illustrate this, as they look out onto what I hope is a beautiful but dystopian vista. 

So often when I am making work I have poems and images by other artists sitting on my shoulders and whispering into my ears as I work. In this case Munch is the big influence especially his woodcut Two Women on the Shore 1898/1906 and his delicious painted woodblock, sawn into three pieces, Two Women on the Shore 1898. - TH