F. is for Foxes of Glasgow

F.  
The Foxes of Glasgow was an anthology of visual art and poetry that I heard about towards the end of 2015.  I can not remember where I heard  of it....but it appealed to me and I thought that I would create some artwork and make a submission to Peter Wright who initiated and coordinated the project. I think he's an English lit student /researcher academic etc etc.

Anyway he was very pleasant to communicate with once I got to the stage of sending him my images.  The other artists whose works were selected for inclusion in the book were Anna Holloway, Deborah Wickham, Michelle Siebert, Lauren McCreadie, and Vivienne Kelly.

I started with making images of foxes - although I had made a little image of a hybrid female fox years ago - I never made a plate of it but always liked it. I imagined it wouldn't be the kind of thing that the anthology would be looking for so made these two plates......

I liked the one with the two foxes together one behind the other and there was also the baby fox which I also dry pointed.
I had this vague notion in my mind of foxes foraging about in peoples rubbish in urban Glasgow and had the idea of a tetrapak that the foxes 'lived inside of' surrounded by a sort of abstract of nature.
So I made a plate from a tetrapak which to be honest I wasn't too pleased with and then wondered whether this was actually a naff idea .......

Left is a Photoshop mock-up,  which on the one hand, is wonderful in the sense of being able to get an idea of what the finished image might look like BUT it can also lead to  one ending up feeling disappointed with what one puts together.

Of course I was also running out of time (research and development taking a lot more time than I had anticipated) - how many times had I nagged my former students about the importance of allowing sufficient time for this !!?
Of course those are the source photos(foxes) with my tetrapak 'house' proof ...so........

LEFT:  another mock-up using another fox image that I really liked, over layered onto a monoprint I had created ages ago.  This kind of image representing  more the "sense" of the fox leaping and rushing through the night domain , so to speak.
You know what ?...I am thinking now 11 April 2019 - that I really like this image and I might yet go back and create it.

I had this proof of like a wash on paper in blue ink and thought of combining that with the tetrapak house and the foxes pair, in the foreground ..........
I quite like this one as well.

In the end I did use the running leaping fox but in a more subtle gentle way as a creature of the sleeping dreaming world.  See the final image.  One of the most annoying things about Foxes of Glasgow (the book) is that

.........................  I CANT FIND IT !!!!! 

Oh well maybe it has joined forces with my book "Art +

Book" by Dorothy Simpson Krause who I exhibited with in

Sweden.  THAT BOOK was my most recently purchased

book...and boo hoo......I just can not find it I have looked all

 over the place.

Of course none of this would have happened if I had not been compelled to move my books 'out of' my studio, because of the roof leak that occurred about a year ago.

Some lovely art catalogues of mine became irreparably
damaged .......... but I suppose these things happen.  My base is in a garage at the side of the house so it isn't the same as being in the main part of the house.