Rik Rawling

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees

Salvaged from the ashen remains of an old sketchbook, this was me about fourteen years ago tapping into a Blakean source of inspiration. William Blake was the “unfortunate lunatic” who scrabbled for decades in near obscurity, finding scarce recognition for his art and writings during his lifetime, all the while being an insuffferably awkward bastard with anyone who tried to befriend him, and burning every single bridge behind him with a fervour that tended to the pyromaniacal. Alas, I feel I might have just described myself there, not that I anticipate any of the posthumous regard Blake how enjoys. Ah well, it’s way too late to change now.

My 2012 portrait of Warren Ellis. Iain Sinclair once described Alan Moore As “John Dee’s roadie” and I think a similar description applies here also. Ellis is a member of the band Dirty Three, who for over 30 years have created a unique fusion of folk, jazz and avant-garde rock music and having never deviated from their core principles they have forced critics and audience alike to accept them on their terms, which is the key triumph for any artist. More recently, Ellis has been a frequent collaborator with Nick Cave, producing several notable film scores, as well as serving as a member of the Bad Seeds. Next month they release their new album Love Changes Everything, their first for 12 years, and from what I’ve heard so far, it’s another gauntlet thrown down at the feet of lesser bands, most of whom are effectively functioning as their own tribute acts. He’s also written the unique book Nina Simone’s Gum, which is a ramshackle rock biography that focusses much of the page count on a truly mad endeavour – to render a piece of chewing gum once masticated by the singer Nina Simone into a golden talisman that could one day become the holy grail for a post-apocalyptic new religion, with Ellis revered as their visionary St John The Divine.

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.

Martin Amis never wrote a sentence like that, did he? Outer Dark was only Cormac McCarthy’s second published novel, but already he was confident enough to plow his own furrow, oblivious to what most others were doing. This drawing was from a 2012 series I made, each inspired by one of McCarthy’s novels and scripts, and for this novel I had to find an image that aligned with my impressions from reading it. In some ways it’s a bleaker book than The Road, because at least in that story the characters are “carrying the fire” and propelling themselves towards some kind of hope, whereas in Outer Dark it’s clear from the first page that the situation is utterly hopeless and readers going past that point should steel themselves for what they are about to go through. It may not be an entirely pleasant experience but every so often we need to look at our reflection on the other side of the mirror, the one where no light lands and if that place needs a name then ‘outer dark’ seems about right to me.

My 2010 sketch of the man himself. When I was a kid, any film with Clint in it was mandatory viewing at our house. The spaghetti westerns and the Dirty Harry films, obviously, but also Where Eagles Dare, Any Which Way But Loose, Play Misty For Me, and many more besides. I also really like some of his later films like Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino and find it hard to believe that he’s still making films to this day. He’s uttered more classic lines than anyone else I can think of, but my favourite is from Coogans’s Bluff:

You better drop that blade, or you won’t believe what happens next… even while it’s happening.

I break horses
Doesn’t take me long
Just a few well-placed words
And their wandering hearts are gone

My 2010 drawing inspired by one of the greatest songs of all time. No hyperbole, just a statement of fact.

Smog (Bill Callahan) – I Break Horses

I’ve had fifty five years on this planet and only seen a kingfisher in the wild once, and it was a fleeting sighting at that. I was sat by a river, somewhere in north-west Wales, on a pleasant summer afternoon. No-one else around and no sounds except the river and the birds in the trees that overhung it, casting lustrous green shadows across the water. Suddenly, out of nowhere, came this blue streak, moving at a speed almost too fast to follow, flying straight along the course of the river. I knew it could only have been a kingfisher, and that was confirmed when about five minutes later it came back the other way, moving at the same speed and with the same unwavering sense of purpose. It was what I call a Hughesian moment, the kind of arresting interaction with the wild that Ted Hughes always regarded with a degree of importance, acknowledging that this was evidence of the universe trying to communicate something to us, had we only the sense to understand it.